


which only hollow voices sing

by sazzafraz



Series: Nous protéger d'en haut [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-01
Updated: 2013-08-24
Packaged: 2017-12-13 15:24:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 60,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/825867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sazzafraz/pseuds/sazzafraz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jackson dies again and stays dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. irregular topics in deconstructed fictions

**Author's Note:**

> Because who really needs to finish shit right?
> 
> So five things-
> 
> 1-there are several may OC's involved in this since it's set about ten years into the future. It's okay, you can deal with it.
> 
> 2-this is actually finished but I won't have time to edit the back end of it until after season 3 starts airing and I want my joss-ing to be at least a little tender.
> 
> 3-I started writing this directly after the season 2 finale and waaaaay before we knew what was going on with Boyd and Erica. As such they are not in this story. At all.
> 
> 4-yes this is yet another series but unlike the other, like, 12, this one is already mostly written
> 
> 5-due to the last six months of my life being kind of not awesome I've created a [new tumblr](http://vievivavoce.tumblr.com/)

\--

Prologue – Lydia Martin, Interrupted

\--  
  
Jackson dies again and stays dead.  
  
She goes to the funeral. Organises the wake. Sits with her hands folded as Danny packs up his bedroom. They burn all of it. His parents opted to give it to charity but the empty room makes them sick and the thought of unpacking makes them hunch over each other and sob. Lydia does it because she’s the strongest, her feet the most grounded, and after all that’s happened she’s found comfort in the cycle of destruction.  
  
Danny hovers. He does that. It’s not the suffocating guilt she gets when she has to deal with Derek or the placating _it will get betters_ she gets from Allison and Co so she lets him do it with as much grace and dignity as she can manage. She builds the pyre, lights the match. Lines of thin flame lick up and over the pile and the wet ground. The fire hisses and spits. She feels safe here, which is a sign of impending doom really; the rapid destruction of fire shouldn’t be comforting. It should make her scared.

  
The light is bright. She can see into the deep, dark woods. She can see the leaves and the grass and she can see no wolves. She thinks about sticking a hand in. She thinks about running away. She thinks about doing none of it and crying. It won’t be tears; her makeup would smear. In the face of death and destruction and the certain knowledge that the wolves will drag her back, it feels like her eyeliner is the only hope she has.  
  
\--

Act I – Irregular Topics of Deconstructed Fictions

\--  
  
Her therapist says she’s experiencing hyper awareness.  
  
The woman is wearing a blue and yellow dotted dress three seasons too late, what the fuck does she know? Yes, she’s checking the windows and the doors and counting the steps between her and the nearest weapon. Yes, she can’t sit still and her whole apartment smells like cloves and magic and she’s bleached everything three times. Yes, her skin feels like it’s going to peel off and she’s so terrified of nothing _at fucking all_ she can’t even speak about. Yes, she hasn’t slept in coming on to four days and she thinks of every shadow and every kicked over pile of dirt as an enemy.  
  
But she’s fine.  
  
Because this is not even a _bad_ day.  
  
Lydia Martin, High School Queen Bee is a) smart, b) _smart_ , c) drop dead gorgeous, and d) unbelievably ferocious when threatened. Lydia Martin, Grudging College Student, Illegal Bakery Owner, is still all of the above but with more bad days than good and a bone deep understanding that who you were in high school actually means jackshit in reality.    
  
There are a lot of things Lydia grew out of and still more that life dragged out. She still thinks the first weapon is a pretty smile and that knowledge is a very close second. She firmly believes in science and the science of knowing how to get yourself out of bad situations. She believes in manipulation and masks and taking care of your body because it might be the only thing you have at the end of the day. She wishes she didn’t have to _know_ the last part so intimately but there’s nothing to be done with a dozen state borders and Canada between her and Peter Hale. She believes in wearing your best heels when you feel like you can’t even stand. She believes that if life is going to make you crawl you better do it with gorgeous hair just to prove you can. She believes in the power of love, still, which is both sad and heart warming.  
     
Most of all she believes that power is power and it’s the person walking like they own everything that has the most of it. You can get through most of life with a con; you’ve just got to know how to sell it.    
  
‘I want to try medication.’ Her therapist says and hands over a prescription, Lydia takes it off her with only a slight tremor. ‘And in a couple of weeks when we know how you’re reacting I want to revisit what we talked about before.’  
  
‘And that is?’  
  
‘Your family. Friends. Talking to them.’  
  
There’s an immediate flash of rage. Her parents are very far away and if she could put more distance between them and the tiny little world she’s carved out she would. ‘I don’t see why. They’ve certainly made no attempts to contact me.’ Everyone in Beacon Hills knows about werewolves now and she’d basically forced Derek into making sure no one followed her. They owe her that much, at least.  
  
‘I’d like to change that.’ Her therapist says slowly. She thinks Lydia is difficult.  
  
‘My issues are not with them.’  
  
Her therapist makes a long suffering noise and writes down more notes. Lydia takes it as taciturn permission to leave.  
  
\--  
  
She gets home with the shopping about an hour before they have to open up for business. Knocks into her apartment and goes from the actual front room of the three room apartment to the magically enlarged three storey that Louisa built with shady promises and a surprising amount of bodily fluid.  
  
‘Louisa!’  
  
‘Oh, hey,’ Louisa’s lime green hair sticks up from where she’s curled up in the high alcove-cum-window seat in the kitchen. Louisa is the sort of thing that happens when an apathetic asshole discovers a talent that’s only really useful when used to help others. She’s the best business partner and cook Lydia could ask for and is actively laconic about it. She hates people and she hates working with people and she considers Lydia the only person misanthropic enough to cohabit with. She’s also the third in a coven of pagan-identified travelling witches but Lydia only really thinks of that when it comes to battle tactics and public holidays. Louisa is five foot nine, wears shoes so she towers over six foot, dresses to the razor edge of fashionable and just obnoxious, and is allergic to socially acceptable behaviour. Louisa is her best friend and her family all rolled up into one grinning, angry mess.  
  
‘Didn’t hear your _click clack_ on the stairs. Tax collectors came by, don’t worry I didn’t talk to them.’  
  
‘Of course not,’ Lydia smirks, Louisa smiles with too many teeth and hops off the ledge, heavy boots and her necklace of spikes ringing dimly. There’s a book open to a recipe and an expectant look on Louisa’s face. ‘That would have helped them.’

She opens the book to the bright pink post it note that says ‘eat me’.She turns to unpacking her ingredients and settling them on her work benches, _chemistry._ Splits the eggs. Warms the butter. Finds the condensed milk and fudges the math a little. Louisa hums under her breath and starts prepping the grill and the pan before she drifts away to make a hot cup of tea; almonds, vanilla and a woodsy undertone that makes an ache of homesickness start up in Lydia’s ribs.  
  
‘Therapy?’  
  
‘She wants me to call my parents. I haven’t talked to them since I left. Why would I start now?’  
  
‘Because you grew up.’  
  
‘Did I?’ The question sours a little, why did she have to leave home to grow up? ‘I heard about the kelpie.’  
  
‘It’s all lies.’ Louisa pours the tea and caps it with a small hazelnut meringue. ‘Plans don’t survive first contact with the enemy.’  
  
‘Is that what you told your professor?’  
  
‘I told my professor that ‘washed up slut’ was a part time job he wasn’t privy to.’  
  
‘Poor thing,’ Lydia says with a smile. ‘If you’re going to try and manipulate people at least do a good job of it.’ Louisa laughs but the words feel lopsided in Lydia’s mouth. Peter did do a good job, didn’t he? That’s the terrible bit, really, she can heal scars and move away but the thoughts will jump around in her head whenever they damn well please.  
  
‘We do what we can.’ Louisa takes over baking and sends Lydia upstairs to set up front.  
  
The bakery was an accident. A half year ago Lydia stumbled home from a party without her shoes and plus a nasty brood debt to an interloping family of vampires. One year to produce a child to be raised as a live in buffet or her death. Louisa had been all for the nuclear option. Lydia had suggested just working it off, after all, who knows what would fill the power vacuum if they did a salt and burn. Eventually they’d agreed on slowly and methodically undermining them and running them out of town. Half the plan hinged on Louisa being terrifying and the other half depended on Lydia developing contacts in the local supernatural families. She’d invited an emissary from a group of local fae to dine with them and found that while species lines and millennia of political discourse soured even the best laid manoeuvring it was an extreme social faux pas to start a war over a dinner table. Eventually it caught on with the more legal and mundane parts of society as a niche establishment. Within four months they’d had the respect of the locals both supernatural and not, the vampires had negated the oath, and they had a stable source of income.     
  
It ended up being a lot like high school, actually.  
  
The night opens and ends with a steady stream of business. The O’Neill’s, a group of miscellaneously defined fae, are having a reunion with their more cannibalistically inclined relatives next to a table of bored computer science majors who are hacking through firewall after firewall of a secure government system. The music is low, there's a hag smoking in the corner, breathing the tendrils in and out again until they completely disappear into her. An array of deadly and mundane has long since become Lydia’s normal.

The matriarch of the O’Neill’s catches her eye and motions her over. She sits Lydia down next to her, so she can see blue tinged faces of the O’Neill clan. A few of them bare their teeth, filed up and almost hanging from their jaws. Ms O’Neill is reedy and tall, with a thin scar on her face that splits open when she talks. ‘Ms Martin, solve a riddle for us.’

Lydia doesn’t sigh. This happens at least once a week. ‘Riddle for a favour.’

‘A minor favour,’ a man even thinner Ms O’Neill says, ‘you’re human after all.’

‘Depends on the riddle.’

‘I like her,’ another man says, this one twice the size of the other man, ‘she’s _funny._ ’

Ms O’Neill rolls her eyes. ‘If I say "Everything I tell you is a lie," am I telling you the truth or a lie?’

‘A lie,’ Lydia says, ‘otherwise it would be contradictory.’

‘What stinks when living and smells good when dead.’ The thin man says.

‘Uncooked meat, to me anyway.’

The thin man smiles and nods his head. The big man scowls, ‘when is it bad luck to meet a white cat?’

‘When you’re prey,’ Lydia flinches, ‘ah.’

‘Not tonight,’ Ms O’Neill says decisively, ‘solve a riddle darling. One man has a trench without a moat, a bag of gold wool, and a mighty need to be rid of both, another man has a river with no end and an equally mighty need to rid himself of it and more than a few money issues. The river is full of death and the gold is cursed. The river cannot be given to someone else in the family by someone in the family. Why?’

‘The past.’ Lydia hesitates, ‘past differences. And I imagine a cursed river could be unappealing.’

The big man snorts.

Ms O’Neill smiles, all her sharpened teeth pushed into stark relief by the blue of her gums. ‘Good, and if neither man will listen to their poor mother what should she do?’

They’re fae so Lydia chooses an answer that suits. ‘Eat them.’

All of them laugh, ‘and if I can’t?’ Ms O’Neill says indulgently.

‘Sell the river to someone else, someone you hate, wait for tragedy to strike and then offer the wool as recompense and take the river back.’ Lydia doesn’t smile, doesn’t offer any reaction.

‘Smart girl,’ the thin man says.

‘Wicked girl,’ the big man says.

‘Good girl,’ Ms O’Neill says with a sigh. ‘Good, go, shoo.’

Lydia rises from the table.

‘We’re closing in a half hour,’ Louisa announces from the kitchen. There’s a hilariously uniform grunting noise from around the room. Everyone feels the same about being kicked out. One of the computer science majors hands her a note on a thickly embossed piece of parchment with writing in Latin; a warning for women to stay inside at night and a hand drawn butterfly with eyes below it. Lydia sighs and pins it to the local message board at the end of the room.    
  
The butterfly murders are the giant elephant in the supernatural room. Six girls taken from various communities splayed open with butterflies pinned on the inside. Anyone with information on the who, what, why and how has been found butchered, more and more grotesquely each time. No one knows who’s doing it so no one wants to start pointing fingers. That’s how wars start. The prescient have been calling her little area a hot spot for a month and a half. She doesn’t expected it to amount to much.  
  
The nicotine stains that lightly discolour the pads of her thumb starts to look mighty appealing. She considers the patrons, all of them are either too respectable or too frightened to try something if she leaves for just five minutes. Louisa won’t care. She pulls a lighter and a cigarette from a battered pack and troops downstairs and into an empty alleyway and leans against a wall.

From her vantage point she can see clear down the street. It’s been two years since Lydia’s seen a major fight; her and Allison in the back of a Glasgow pub, really bad odds and a contingent of irate Bean Nighe one thin wooden door away. Allison had gotten what she came for and Lydia, well, she got an _experience._

Two years since she’s seen Allison and near to a decade since she’s so much as thought about Beacon Hills. She watches herself in her mirror every day, catches shadows under her eyes, thin lines that will stretch out as she ages, rots into her body. It’s a wonder she even got out with how hard that town tried to drown her.

‘ _Nous protéger d'en haut_.’ She says, tapping her foot against the ground and crossing her arms across her chest. The words are warm when she says them but cool as they cross her teeth. A million prayers for safety said every minute, hard to be sure if hers makes it through.

The lighter catches on the second try and it’s when she’s tilting her head back to blow rings that something hits her face. She picks it up and examines it. A curved blue and black butterfly wing. Another falls on her shoulder and then another. Red and gold, green and yellow, blue and black and blue and black. She steps away from the wall and lets her eyes trail up. Her heart beats faster; breathe catches like slow motion in a horror film. Feet, grotesque and bloated, legs stuffed full of something non human.  She sees the sliver of a monarch wing poke out of an arm where the skin is peeled back and slightly puckered. She sees the uneven bulging. She sees the girls face. See’s her dull blonde hair catch and release the moonlight. She see’s all of it, has it seared on to her memory.  
  
She starts screaming.  
  
\--  
  
‘Fuck,’ Louisa hands her a cup of tea and starts pacing again. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.’

Lydia concentrates on the flavours of the tea; green tea with the sharp edge of something on the side. Her brain won’t supply it. Her mind is trying to slot it everything into place, hitting against the edges of her mammal brain, the part that says she’s panicking, warring with her lizard brain, the part that says she’s drowning. Someone will clean up the body, canvass the area. Lydia and Louisa will say nothing but everyone will know. Everyone knows what they do.

Lydia sighs. ‘We can’t stay here. We’re sitting ducks for any dumb hunter looking for a name to put on a wall.’

‘Doesn’t have to be a hunter.’ Louisa clucks her tongue. ‘Plenty of people don’t like us.’

It’s been a bad decade for the supernatural. Hunter factions are stronger than ever and more and more things are turning up out of the woodwork. Old things. _Scary_ things. With the masquerade slowly falling apart every day people are learning that what goes bump in the night is real and scarier than they can imagine. Lydia’s spent the last four years learning every obscure scrap of knowledge she can just in case, she can’t really fault someone who doesn’t even have the benefit of her immunity for listening to the guy with the gun telling you they know how to kill it. 

‘There are a couple places we can go.’ Louisa says.  
  
Lydia’s lip curls. ‘It’s not a ‘we’.’  
  
‘Fuck you of course it’s a fucking _we_ ,’ Louisa stubs out her fifth cigarette. ‘I barely tolerate people and you’re the only fucking person in this town who can make a _coq au vin_ that doesn’t make me think of entrails. What the fuck would I do in _Canada_ of all fucking places without you?’  
  
‘It’s not my fault Canadians give you hives.’  
  
‘I like the dark scary underbelly of America, no one does shit for you, it makes sense to me.  
Canadians are nice fucking people.’  
  
Lydia scowls and drums her fingers against the table. ‘What are we going to do?’  
  
Louisa flourishes a hand and a notepad appears. ‘I’m glad you asked. We’ve got the hubs, there are two Houses left in America. We can’t go international without papers and the guy I usually go to is deep underground. Chicago, which I’d ah, suggest against, big personalities and the most obnoxious piece of shit wizard boy, like seven and a half miles of no fucking thank you and a chivalry complex. No to New York unless you wanna deal with some serious crossover of jurisdiction, there are a few neutral parties and while I know we’re badass enough to bend them I don’t want to have to get involved in the power games.’  
  
Lydia goes to the sink and washes her tea cup, small and green under the water. ‘No where small townish?’  
  
‘There are a couple.’ Louisa hesitates. ‘Minnesota, a small commune in Iowa. Texas? Portland?’  
  
‘Doesn’t Iowa have a banshee problem?’  
  
‘Iowa has the problem of being Iowa, everything else is related.’  
  
Lydia considers the problem from as many angles as possible. The only way for women like her and Louisa to stay safe in this community is to appear on equal footing and most of all _useful_ to the surrounding area. It doesn’t matter that Lydia has the highest IQ for 20 miles in any direction and beauty will get her raped _and_ murdered instead of just straight up dead. Half of the _beings_ she serves coffee to on a regular basis are old enough to remember eating the carrion from at least one major war. Not a single one of them would hesitate to kill her. A small town they have connections to or a large one where no one will care are the only real options, even if there’s a huge part of her that just wants to be able to drive from one end of town to the other in under an hour in heavy traffic. ‘No.’  
  
Louisa shifts uncomfortably. ‘There’s another place, guaranteed protection, built in supernatural infrastructure, booming local economy could totally use our, uh, unique talents.’  
  
Lydia frowns. ‘Why wouldn’t you talk about it first?’  
  
‘It’s a sleepy town in California, lots of woods I hear.’ Lydia breathes through a moment of sheer panic before her higher brain kicks in and starts on the possibilities. Louisa’s mouth works for something before she lets it go again. ‘We can swing New York.’  
  
‘Beacon Hills,’ the words taste like ash and fire and wood splinters, ‘let’s go with that.’  
  
‘I marked out a few properties.’ Louisa says guiltily.  
  
Of course she did.  
  
There’s a packet with a brochure for Beacon Hills. Bright and well lit, not so many buzzwords (‘local wolf population’, ‘old woods’, ‘almost magical atmosphere’, ‘illuminating history’) that newbie hunters will not catch on to immediately but enough to give those _in the know_ a good idea of what to expect. It’s strange seeing the cold, grey streets of her small town against the hard marble and steel of the home and hearth she has literally made herself. The streets look narrower, the people kinder and more aloof. The side profile of her old English teacher in a classroom full of kids she doesn’t know is unsettling; it winds age into her bones to be so far gone from a place that made so much of her, cracks and all. Her town has good schools, a ‘booming local economy’, a chain bookstore, a yarn superstore, an ‘active nightlife’. There are still red flags, Louisa is a good researcher and the info packet says that a third of the town is owned by the mysterious BayLaurel, which when she thinks about it was really obvious and nostalgic on Derek’s part. Louisa slapped it with a sticky note that says ‘good option but if there are better for fucks sake take it’.  
  
The newborn city centre is on shaky enough legs that they could slip in easily, but as Louisa’s notes suggest there’s already a few heavy hitters making shop. Even one or two of the old families. Old means _old_ with these guys. New blood is only welcome if it’s dripping from a cracked skull. Further out into the older neighbourhoods there are three properties with a range of pluses and bonuses. All of them are a little towards the edge of town. There’s one that boasts a corner spot and one small bright, bright blue door, smooth and shiny like a stone. It doesn’t matter what she thinks about the price or the situation of the other ones her eyes drag back to the blue door. There’s a small kitchen that needs renovating and a room upstairs Louisa has indicated is perfect for magical remodelling.  
  
‘Home again.’ Lydia says and if her heart beats faster there’s no one around who hears well enough to tell.  
  
\--  
  
Her parents get her a new age anti medication therapist after the pills make her smash the mirror and run bloody fingers all over the dress Jackson bought her for her last birthday. Dr Kilton, they say, is an expert at getting results from patients who have trouble on medication. Lydia thinks he means the real nutjobs. He’s nice and handsome in that bland, dime a dozen way that gets exalted in modern American values. She tries charming him, she tries manipulating him; he insists on smiling politely and doing what he wants anyway.  
  
She likes him, probably, hard to be sure nowadays.  
  
The first time he makes her talk about ‘safe places’ she nearly throws a chair at him. That was the whole fucking point wasn’t it? Nowhere was safe. Not her home, her school, her body in her clothes, her mind in her own fucking head. Nothing was safe. She screamed as much in his face; her legs shaking, hair blowing up into a tangled mess. It was cathartic. Even if she can’t scream about werewolves or kanima’s or Peter fucking Hale she can scream about her body. About the worms she still feels inside her skin. Dr Kilton looks at her with eyes that are more angry than understanding and it’s the fierce line of his mouth that makes her calm down. Someone else knows, she thinks giddily, someone else _listened._  
  
He makes her build a pillow fort. Lydia Martin in her favourite little dress and fuck you heels making a tiny house of pillows and blankets like she’s five and has nowhere else to be. She makes it grandiose. Makes it her own. Folds hospital corners and tucks patterned pillows into the corners. Dr Kilton makes her climb inside and then says he’s going to leave he’ll be just outside the door if she needs him. She scoffs at him, loudly, and scrambles inside.  
  
She sits inside until it’s quiet and all she can hear is the slight rustle of the pale blue sheets above her, the scrunch of the paisley patterned pillows when she moves, the slants of light between the peach and the pale yellow that covers her knees. She tries to wipe it away, the light on her knees, tries to push it back when it starts to feel warm. Her hands aren’t covered in dirt, not covered in worms. It’s just light on her knees. Just warmth on her skin. She sticks a hand through the parting of the cloth and it’s more light and more bright into her tiny fabric world. Hers. Just hers. No one but her has touched this.  
  
Her fingers tingle and she folds them up into her chest and pulls her knees up. Breathes. Cries and shakes and comes together again, tired and old and hurt, all the same but for the fact that she remembers what the light felt like on her skin. Remembers that she’s not always covered in dirt and blood and worms.  
   
She stays in the fort until the slant of light fades.  
  
\--

They leave under the cover of a moonless night. The hearth crumbles under the weight of Louisa’s words and the front room that was home to so many meals and conversations wavers in front of Lydia’s eyes and dissolves like it was never there to begin with. The trip from Canada back to Beacon Hills goes too fast with a combination of magic and the last of Lydia’s anxiety medication. One moment she’s standing at the edge of an abandoned building that still stinks of the fresh blood, fire, and cloves of magic and the next she’s tucking into uniform motel room a little ways down from the main road into Beacon Hills.

There’s no parade as they cross the boundary line, no shiver or shake as the world welcomes her home. Lydia grits her teeth as they pull into the realtor tucked in next to an old fish and chips store. She ate there a few times. The fish was good but the chips were always soggy.

Buying the property induces a splitting headache that no amount of painkillers and desperate pleas to higher powers will end. While Cahmicheal Fitch is perhaps one of the most corrupt people Lydia has had to deal with in several months, and she may or may not have baked a high level enforcer of hell a blueberry crostata last week, he is also the only man in Beacon Hills willing to harbour an undeclared witch in the political nexus that is Beacon Hills. He smiles to brightly at Lydia and winks, ‘you look familiar.’

Lydia rolls her eyes. She pointedly looks at the piece of paper he is not signing declaring the property theirs do to with magically. ‘I shouldn’t.’

‘Now that’s no fair,’ he drawls, ‘you’re so supposed to say ‘who do I look like then?’ so I can say my ‘next girlfriend’.’

‘Does that line usually work for you?’

He shrugs. ‘Enough.’

‘Unfortunately I have higher standards for rejections let alone people I would consider.’ She says saccharine, ‘however if my standards ever fall below corpses and corduroy I’ll call you.’

Fitch laughs, ‘You have my number. Do you have the money?’

Louisa handled acquiring money since it’s hard to fill in tax forms for ‘illegal bakery and frequent supernatural hotspot’ without sounding the kind of insane she doesn’t want to associate with anymore. Lydia nods. ‘You’ll receive it discreetly.’  
  
‘You’ll still have to get a permit.’ Fitch says as he finally, _finally_ signs the contract.  
  
She takes it from him, gives it a once over to make sure it’s the same as when she had one of the guys in her old legal class look over it. ‘Inspections on Tuesday.’  
  
‘That’s not the kind of inspection I meant.’ He goes very quiet. ‘Look, you know about BayLaurel or not?’  
  
She quirks an eyebrow. ‘I do.’  
  
‘Get your permit.’ He says before yanking the contract out of her hands and marching out the door leaving a set of keys behind; blue and shiny.  
  
She calls Louisa, arranges a pick up, and plays with the keys all the way to the shop. They get to the property at the same time as the movers and Lydia’s hands shake as she twists the keys into the door. The door creaks and it’s endearing and lovely. Louisa pushes it open and they step in at the same time.

Years ago the space was a dental surgery. The walls are boxed to make a clear reception area attached to a long thin hallway with five doors. The walls are a hideous off colour yellow-green colour and the hallway corners are speckled with mould. There’s a pile of debris sitting in the centre of the reception space. Every so often a piece of plaster falls from the ceiling. 

Lydia shudders at the thought of renovating it non-magically. ‘How long will it take you?’

Louisa shrugs, ‘kill a cow, eat its liver; six hours?’

‘I’ll go to the hardware store.’

Louisa just waves her off and sets about pulling knives from the side of her ribs. The knives are oddly sickle shaped and unsettling bone bright. Lydia looks away, it’s better not to think about witches.

Outside on the street Lydia can clearly smell the soggy chips, clearly hear children, clearly taste the unique scent of the too close woods and the worse memories. A mother walks past with her happy screaming child tucked up in her arms. The child’s hair is shiny blonde with health. 

‘Oh god.’ She breathes out shakily, crosses her fingers over her chest. ‘ _Nous protéger d'en haut_.’

\--  
  
It’s early morning in Beacon Hills, there’s a half eaten plate of bacon and eggs on the table as well as a solid third of a new bottle of champagne. Eight half used paint tins are dripping with brushes. The walls are a mess of colours; kaleidoscope from pale green to butter yellow to the last streaks of blue at sunset.  There are thousands of paint swatches all over the service area and it is driving Lydia up the wall. She has them arranged across three mismatching tables in an approximation of a colour wheel. The chairs and tables are half assembled. Louisa is wearing more of the spray chalk than the wall is; although it might just be that she’s screaming down the phone too loudly to pay attention to where the nozzle is pointed.  
  
‘No, asshole, I do not want that,’ Louisa says joyfully angry. ‘Listen, what the fuck ever you are- _Lahey,_ what kind of fucking name is that? I want you to deliver it at- no, thats not, you know what, I change my mind shove a knife up your arse you uncouth, oh, that’s uncalled for, you’re uncalled for you bastard, just do what your goddamn flyer says you do and I’ll be as fucking polite as you want me.’ Louisa hangs up with a flourish, no one likes being an absolute asshole the way Louisa does. It’s her daily mission to make as many people see the ugly side of humanity as possible.  
  
‘Was that for the oven?’  
  
‘And the shelving. If you say you’re a three day delivery you don’t get to make me wait five to six business days,’ she waggles her fingers, ‘I _like_ phone calls to management.’  
  
Lydia holds up a swatch with a touch of desperation. ‘Magnolia trimming.’  
  
‘Sunbaked Terrecota?’  
  
‘With Blueberry White tables? No, absolutely not.’  
  
Louisa picks up a random colour from the ‘no, never, stop now’ pile and presses it to her forehead, ‘Sumptuous Plum.’  
  
Lydia hides half a smile behind her hand. ‘You are terrible. You should feel terrible.’  
  
‘Can’t, shan’t.’ The door swings open and a couple of men bustle in with heavy kitchen appliances. Lydia turns a shoulder to the cold air while Louisa shrieks and joyfully rips into them. The air continues to blow in. There are heavy footfalls but no shadows and no noises but Louisa’s, the movers, and her own sharp breathe. Nothing _human_ moves like that. Her first, and if she’s being honest, _only_ reaction to sounds she can’t place is caution followed quickly by escalating violence. Her hands shake. The world narrows with adrenaline.  
  
‘Excuse me,’ a polite male voice says, ‘I have the speciality ingredients.’  
  
The panic ebbs and she turns on her heel.  
  
Oh.  
  
‘McCall.’  
  
‘Lydia,’ he says with a wide smile. She blinks back a quick flush of memories, mostly about his mouth. Scott looks, well, he looks like he always did. Kind and capable, like he had potential. The tight shirts that all the werewolves run around in, worn in jeans, boots. Taller, broader, way, way, _way_ more tattoos. The difference between looking at someone at 16 and look at them at 26 is that the roots of who you are have thickened up into their body. Who you are is pressing into the edges of reality. Lydia can feel the deep waters of the insecure girl with the masks reach out towards the steady roots of whoever Scott McCall is now. The first face from ten years ago that she’s seen _smiles_ like he’s happy to see her and it feels like something that’s been rattling around has finally settled deep in her chest.  
  
Needless to say, she’s off balance.  
  
‘What are you doing here?’  
  
‘You came back, so,’ he spreads his arms, ‘welcoming committee.’  
  
And by welcoming committee we mean nosy werewolves. ‘I see.’  
  
His smile turns sheepish. ‘And we uh, need to know what you’re doing here.’  
  
Called it.  
  
She gestures to the mess and debris around her. Scott walks into the room like this is all perfectly normal, places the package on a table. She rolls her eyes and an awkward stalemate falls over them both. He’s waiting for her to just give in and ask and Lydia has her nose up in the air. She gives in after Louisa looks at her like she’s being a special kind of weird. ‘Setting up shop.’ She says.  
  
He gives her a look and settles comfortably against a table. Asshole. ‘You rolled out of town  
and said you weren’t coming back.’  
  
‘Circumstances.’  
  
‘Ah,’ he flicks his wrist, the thick inked swirled their shifts on his skin, ‘circumstances. Well, I’m here to help if you need me.’  
  
‘You joined up?’  
  
‘It’s both more and less complicated than that.’ He looks around the room. ‘This used to be a surgery.’  
  
Lydia rolls her eyes, ‘you’re here on business.’    
  
‘I’m being polite.’  
  
‘I think there might be a misunderstanding about how much I appreciate your politeness.’  
  
‘You think,’ he says amusedly, ‘ _I_ never set out to hurt you.’  
  
‘That doesn’t change anything.’  
  
He grimaces. ‘I didn’t think so. See you around?’  
  
‘Probably not.’  
  
He gives her a wide open smile, shakes his head, leaves just as quietly as he walked in.  
  
‘He’s cute,’ Louisa wraps her arms around Lydia’s waist and leans in.  
  
‘He’s nice.’  
  
‘That’s always a problem.’ She says with a deep regretful sigh. ‘This Lahey person says we’ll have the order by sundown. Want to help me put up the wards?’  
  
‘Not today, I don’t want to bleed all over the floors before I have to.’  
  
Louisa squeezes her once and lets go, ‘knives can be fun.’  
  
‘Your kinkage may vary.’ She replies snottily. Louisa laughs.  
  
In the end Louisa had just linked the upstairs to the top two floors of an abandoned hotel somewhere in downtown LA. Lydia has rooms 717 through to 723. Louisa has the even numbers. All her bags and her furniture are sitting in the hallway, a thin sheet of dust layered over. _Roomba’s_ , she thinks, _a fleet of them_. Her bedroom is number 719, the walls a near pearlescent shade of green. There’s no wallpaper and the carpet smells less than the other rooms. It’s enough to start with. The first thing to come out of the boxes are her notebooks.  
  
She used to ground herself in math. Not just because it’s the general identifier of smart, being easier to quantify then an encyclopaedic knowledge of history and easier to grade then a philosophy essay. Math is right or it is wrong and most mistake that for simple. No one knows better than she does how much of a lie _simple_ is. Simple is doing what the psychopath says, simple is lying to all your friends, simple is what’s easy and easy is very rarely right. Lydia likes math because it’s a Rosetta stone to the universe, a how to for documenting and understanding the minutiae of an ever expanding indecipherable series of connections. Like most people with a finely honed sense for weakness and an unabashed streak of cruelty, Lydia knows that means _control_ and control means _power._ It should have occurred that _indecipherable universe_ means _unquantifiable and likely to shift at any moment, likely to shift_ against _you._ It didn’t, which is a pity for her.

She’ll admit to completely losing it for about 6 months. Jackson died, the fucking Alpha Pack came, Stiles and Allison and their terrifying parallel jump into family darkness; but she thought she could turn it around. She’s a genius. She’s Lydia goddamn Martin. She got her early acceptance and she went to her first choice school and for a year or so everything was exactly how she pictured it.

During the political upheaval following Allison’s 19th birthday several extreme factions of hunters descended on Beacon Hills. Lydia doesn’t give a fuck about that; everyone she cared about was dead, gone, or sufficiently dangerous. Trouble follows beaten paths though and Lydia had hers burnt around her. When the worst of it begin; the Hattsfield riots, the demolishing of the Houses, mass supernatural exposures, she had Allison’s insignia on a necklace and the Hale packs’ legacy hanging just behind her heels. She thought she was safe. To be fair to the girl she was at 19 it probably wouldn’t have occurred to anyone in even the most farfetched scenarios that she would become one of the subjects of pre-trials for a supernatural bio weapon. Especially one that causes violent hallucinations.

No one, anywhere, wants to talk about 2013. It was a shit year for everyone.    

There was a cleanup, a cover up, and Lydia was left with the twice ruined dregs of her brilliance to _make do._ After awhile the numbers kept saying the same thing ( _you’re crazy, you weren’t enough, you are crazy and your mind is not your own_ ) and academia is no place to have a mental breakdown. Eventually it was easier to worry about the price of vanilla beans and vaguely immoral profit margins than it was to worry about which of her professors would give her the sad ‘lost prodigy’ once over and call her done.  
  
She pulls open all the notebooks and covers the floor with open pages. She creates paths between them and her drawers, her bed, the bathroom. Then she takes a bottle of deep red ink out of a box and spills it liberally on the floor. The ink on the floor forms a tree and Louisa has to have put some blood on the walls because the pages sink in like they did in their last apartment. A tangible swirling mass of writing, hers, on the floor, crawling the walls, making stars on the ceiling. She watches as the numbers and letters slowly start to form, her own universe surrounding her.    
  
That done, she sets up her lotions and make-up on a small beat up dresser she liberated from a failed relationship. Fills her draws with clothes. Calmly and efficiently sets up her room. Dr Kilton would be proud.  
  
The afternoon fades to evening with a book and a pomegranate candle. The early night sounds start, a truck rumbles past the store front. Louisa calls for dinner and they eat it on the front stoop tucked up and into each other. Two cars drive past, lights flashing past and lighting up the gutters where little shards of magic laced glass have been pressed into the fabric of the town.  
  
‘It’s prettier than I thought it would be.’  Louisa says quietly.  
  
‘I forgot,’ Lydia sighs, ‘how alive it was. I only remember the bad parts.’  
  
Louisa presses a hand to her shoulder. A moving truck comes battering down the street and halts in front of them. A tall man, blonde brown hair and a fitted jumper steps out. _Lahey_ , Lydia thinks suddenly, _only one of those_. Another man with a profile that’s sort of hard to forget when it features in your nightmares steps out on the driver’s side. Lydia takes their empty bowls and goes inside, calms the whirlwind in her chest, finds the focus she needs to not panic. Behind the counter near the sink she stands with the tiniest rattle of the spoons against the green ceramic of the bowls. She can see him.  
  
Derek Hale looks...comfortable.  
  
He’s the same height, width, and build with the thinnest start of gray around the tips of his ears.  The same sharp cut face and hair. The difference is in the evenness of his shoulders. He looks less like he might try and gnaw off your leg just because, less like a scared child. He’d be attractive if she couldn’t see the relation to Peter in the set of his eyes and the jut of his jaw and the lines around his eyes. Looking at him makes her feel small and insecure.

The last time she saw him she’d just finished trying to kill Peter. She’d failed; Stiles of all fucking people had gone head to head with her and ruined the whole fucking thing. He tried to talk her down and called Derek when he couldn’t.  She still has the indents of Derek’s teeth curled over her right shoulder. Derek still has her wolfsbane infused finger prints stamped on the back of his neck; it’s almost like being even.

  
Louisa curves her body over the counter with an expression that suggests she’s taken everyones number and found them boring. She leans toward Lydia. ‘That guy looks like he used up the last of his gas to go get more hair gel only to find his favourite brand has just been replaced with a knock off.’  
  
‘He used to look like his entire family burnt to death and he’d kill you just for thinking about it, so that’s really an improvement.’ Lydia replies, wringing her hands in a tea towel.  
  
Both of the wolves snort and haul the parts inside. Louisa follows Isaac when he goes to install the oven. She can hear the ill temper bubbling up and over. Derek keeps moving and setting things up as he goes. He’s graceful and quiet and even if he did have ill intent Louisa is more than strong enough to handle him. So is Lydia, if she has to be.  
  
‘We need to talk about Peter.’ Derek says with a handful of bolts in his hand.  
  
‘No we don’t.’ She’s too sharp and quick in her dismissal. Derek makes a nasty little lip curl and steps into her space.  
  
Louisa and Isaac are back in a flash. Isaac makes to frame Lydia and keep Louisa on the outside. Pack mentality, not very imaginative. ‘You know when a lady says ‘no’ you’re supposed to listen.’ Louisa snaps.  
  
‘Witch.’ Isaac hisses.  
  
‘Bitch, actually, step off.’ Fire rings around the pinky of Louisa’s finger. ‘I said step _off_ , wolf.’  
  
‘Lydia-’  
  
‘Is he dead?’ She says, pointedly touching her hair. There is a very thin trace amount of a specific kind of wolfsbane in her hair conditioner. Benefits of immunity. It wouldn’t hurt a human but if she gets even a few strains into a wolf he’ll be down for the count.  
  
‘No.’  
  
‘Can I kill him?’  
  
Derek scowls. ‘No.’  
  
‘Then there’s nothing to talk about. Keep him away from me and we’ll have no problem.’  
  
‘There’s more to it than that.’  
  
‘While it’s nice that you’ve finally entered the land of adulthood with the rest of us, Derek, I’d like to remind you that it is not _my_ uncle who crawled inside the head of a 17 year old and fucked it up.’  
  
‘Lydia,’ he says stricken.  
  
Her therapist says she’s blunt like it’s a bad thing. It hasn’t steered her wrong so far. ‘Thank you for the oven.’  
  
Derek frowns. ‘This isn’t over,’ then softer, ‘this isn’t your town and things are more complicated than you could imagine.’  
  
Derek leaves somewhat petulantly for a man in his thirties. Isaac hovers on the edge of Louisa’s space for a hostile minute before snapping, ‘there’s a book under your name at the library.’  
  
He leaves. Louisa reinforces the wards.  
  
At least they got the oven.  
  
\--

Jackson dies like this:  
  
They are in a car. They’ve been in a car for awhile now on the way to some great somewhere. He won’t say he loves her but at this point she doesn’t care. He does. They cross the border of Beacon Hills and his skin caves, his eyes hollow, scales erupt and flee his skin. By the time the car rumbles to a stop he is a husk and he is not beautiful.  
  
Jackson dies like this:  
  
Peter with a torch in the dark woods. Lydia can’t hold him out anymore. She’s tied to the ground and leaking red. Peter slashes Jackson’s throat, cradles Lydia gently in red fingers. She kills him with his own knife but by then all the love in the world couldn’t bring Jackson back. There is not enough in the world to exchange a life.  
  
Jackson dies like this:  
  
They are old. Very old. Their skin is soured and peppered with milestones. She is soft around the middle. He is the kind of beautiful that says nostalgia. They hold hands. The last sound is the sweet high note of grandchildren.  
  
The truth is that Jackson dies like this:  
  
In the dark. Alone. She is not there. She doesn’t know, not really.  
  
In all the years and nights since she’s never been able to end _Jackson dies_ without her brain stuttering, stopping, and trying to end with three words she’s not ready to think about.   

\--  
  
She’s been in Beacon Hills 360 hours. The tables are covered in pastries. There is cream on the ceiling.  
  
‘Fresh fruit tarts and éclairs and croissants and profiteroles.’ Lydia says to the still air at 6am, ‘and meringues and biscotti and french earl gray.’    
  
‘Opening day.’ Louisa pours out the first of many espressos.  
  
‘Opening day.’  
   
At eight am it starts to snow. At eight forty five an armada of people, supernatural and not, swarm into the bakery. They reach 75% capacity and hover there until the lunch hour pushes them over capacity and Louisa ups from gentile hostility to outright verbal warfare to get through the coffee orders. It thins out again after the mid-afternoon rush and stays pleasant until about a half hour before closing time. Louisa has long since retired to the kitchen, serving out tray after tray of baked goods so Lydia can handle actual human to human contact. The last lot of five year olds with a battered, tired mother have kicked and screamed out the front door. Her tea has just settled into the mottled yellow and china blue cup.

‘Christ,’ Lydia’s spent enough hours on her feet to know that the second she moves behind the counter she is really truly _done._  
  
A man walks in and with the sheer amount of stories that start that way she should be less surprised by the wide whiskey eyes and bright smile that greet her.  
  
Stilinski, then, god this lot are quick.  
  
He slinks around the store. Lydia has seen dozens of people do the quick footed walkaround Louisa’s work, the step around a too specific spell, the half muttered word of protection and acknowledgement. He’s taking her measure and Louisa will be taking his.

Stiles has edged into himself too. More so than Scott or Derek, she thinks. His hair is long and slightly curled, his clothes fit, there is a thick scar peeking out from under a scarf that wraps around his throat. He stands like he’d either hug you or stab you in the throat and is just having a hard time choosing. There’s a comfort in his skin that she’s not really interested in learning the origin of.  
  
He settles in front of her with loosely crossed ankles. ‘Well then.’  
  
She sips her tea. The power is palpable; the taste of the tea has changed to the taste of the woods. ‘You finally learnt to dress.’  
  
‘This old thing?’ A strong boned hand runs over the dark jumper, the same as Isaac’s, it might even be a uniform. He smiles, properly, the way he used to look at her comes back, wide eyed astonishment and respect. People don’t look at her like that anymore. The air turns _something_ for a moment and fizzles out again. Stiles searches her face for something, face flashing through sadness, fear, resignation, and a half dozen other things before settling on relief.    
  
‘Don’t look now but you’ve got a witch in your kitchen.’ He says with an edge.  
  
‘Two of them.’ She picks up her tea, places two fruit tarts on a plate, and takes them over to an empty table. They talk without a hint of awkwardness for a half hour. There was a few months way back when they became friends of a certain kind. Two humans in a pack full of monsters. Most of the time Lydia thought it was the two of them everyone should be afraid of. After all, Peter was in her head and she _knows_ how he felt about him, the weird obsession, the _offers._ Stiles walks like a predator but he’s still a little awkwardly proportioned, hands too large, fingers too long. Lydia has spent her whole life painting on a war face; she knows how to spot another solider.

The wards knit shut over the entrance proclaiming them officially closed for business. Stiles looks around the cafe again and again. Each time his eyes come to her a little bit more of the kindness is gone. She’s not sure if she’s pleased that they think enough of her to escalate this far or sad that whatever good will she had is fading.  
  
‘Not what you expected?’  
  
‘No, I just, I thought you’d solve the Yang-Mills not,’ he waves his hands and suddenly he’s sixteen again, loose and uncomfortable in the lines of his body, ‘this!’  
  
She sighs into a smile, tucks her hair back and sits up tall. ‘Who says I haven’t? Stiles, I can barely leave the house some days, I panic, I get scared.’  
  
‘Well, yeah.’ he says. ‘Yeah.’  
  
This conversation is no longer about her and while she has grown less offended by Stiles Stilinski’s everything she has other things to do today than deal with his identity crisis. ‘Stiles,’ his eyes flick to hers and down again, ‘how’d you get the scar on your neck?’  
  
He full bodily jerks. ‘Territory dispute. It was really bad down here for awhile, about a year after you left, actually. No one was sure who was in charge and Scott-’ he shrugs, ‘well, Scott got his hero on. It didn’t work out for us properly, not for a long time.’  
  
‘I’m sorry.’  
  
‘No you’re not.’ And there’s the man behind the chair. She’s heard stories about Beacon Hills. About the wolves and the man they only half mockingly call _knight errant_. Chess isn’t a game for the half hearted, not when the pieces are real and full of teeth. She waits him out, keeps eye contact until he gets fidgety and holds it still when he slips quietly into fight mode. She can literally watch the choices fly by, _does he interrogate her more, does he back off, does he push more subtlety, does he do away with it all and make demands and threats._ She smiles and keeps placid eye contact until all the hair rises on his arms and his fingers twitch. Danger, Lydia Martin.     
  
‘You would have done anything for me back then,’ she says quietly.  
  
‘Back then.’ Stiles rises from the chair with a nod and a jaunty little swagger. He nods to Louisa.  Louisa hisses at him. That, if anybody asks, is what Lydia likes most about Louisa. She’s unrepentantly fearless, even to the point of being rude. Louisa is still scowling when she brings over a tray of sugar and macadamia cookies and a pot of French earl gray. She snaps a cookie in half and shoves it into her mouth. ‘Little shit, smiling all the fucking time like I don’t know what he’s packing. Bastard didn’t even notice when I,’ she wiggles her fingers, ‘him.’  
  
‘Probably didn’t think you were worth fighting with.’  
  
Louisa frowns, sugar glistening on her bottom lip. ‘Dick. Fighting’s half the fun of being a witch.’  
  
‘The other half is fucking.’  
  
‘The other half is chaos and mayhem and knowing how to stay in the game,’ she dunks the remaining biscuit into her coffee and downs the whole soggy mess, ‘so yeah, fucking. I’ve got a new recipe, what say you, me, and a half litre of apple sauce go get dirty?’  
  
‘What do you have?’  
  
‘You remember the applesauce mini tarts we tried to make.’  
  
‘They fell apart.’ They’d had the idea while swapping whiskey on Thanksgiving. Tiny little pie crusts that were high class enough for ‘foodie’ crowd. The trick was to somehow combine the pastry and the sauce in a way that didn’t make it crumble. That had been particularly aggravating. You could have a thicker chunkier applesauce that would eventually just turn into mini apple pies or you could have a sticky over sweet batter that went with pretty much nothing else on the menu or you could have a perfect combination of apple and pastry that would not bake right. She’d been stuck on it for a week before Louisa had set the recipe on fire, for Lydia’s well being, of course.  
  
‘Right, so, I thought, wait for it, I’m a fucking genius, _caramel and nuts._ ’  
  
‘You are not even close to the first person to think of that.’  
  
‘Bitter much? Caramel. Covered. Nuts. Think, we take finely crushed nuts and press them into the pie crust, you make all your fancy little shapes, bake it, and then we put a thin layer of apple glaze all over that motherfucker and top it with caramel.’  
  
‘Huh.’  
  
Louisa rolls her eyes. ‘I am the best, just agree with me.’    
  
\--  
  
At first it seems like some sort of setup. _You’re an unknown in a dangerous town you swore you wouldn’t come back to unless it was in a body bag. You’re dangerous. We’re watching._  
  
But no, apparently Scott McCall really does just need three cups of coffee a day.  
  
At nine thirty he wants an espresso shot and whatever specialty muffin they have for the day. Between two and four he wants _two_ espresso shots and a Panini, between seven and close he wants decaf and as much of her attention as he can take up. Three days in he brings in a Sudoku and throws questions at her, a week later he brings random equations to write up on the chalked wall and times how long it takes for her to solve them. On day twenty three he figures out that green is her favourite colour and wears it four days in a row. At the end of the month she realises that he’s basically cut himself a hole in her life. She is waiting at seven and ten and four for his voice and his conversation. There must be something in the water here because she’s barely even irritated.    
  
‘Are you going to ask?’ Scott says through a mouthful of orange, white wine, and shallot marinated chicken.  
  
Lydia shrugs and eats more of her own dinner. The seats by the window are cold. ‘For?’  
  
‘A permit.’  
  
‘I’ve never needed anyone’s permission in my life.’  
  
Scott tilts his head like he was expecting that answer. ‘I’ll get you one anyway, it’ll keep some of the locals off your back.’  
  
‘I can get it myself.’  
  
‘From Peter?’ He says slowly. ‘He’s in charge of all that sort of stuff.’  
  
‘If I have to.’ Her voice is smaller than she’d prefer.  
  
Scott frowns. ‘You don’t have to.’  
  
‘That’ll be $16.50.’ She says sharply. Much sharper than she meant. Scott doesn’t change, stays calm and warm as he eats the last of the pilaf and drinks his water. She can barely taste her own, the shallots feel too big and the wine makes her feel heavy. It all sours a little with emotion. The sharp strike her heels make on the floor as she walks away is as fast as her heart, too fast by half.   
  
Scott catches her shoulder on the way out forgivingly and leaves an overly generous tip, calls, ‘you really don’t have to.’  
  
The stores wards knit over and the lights dim. That’s not quite true though, is it? It’s Derek’s town and she’s just living here, if Peter hasn’t ripped him to shreds yet he probably won’t ever do it. Beacon Hills isn’t big enough for avoidance. She’s never been the type to wait for things she didn’t have to. She thumbs the phone book through random street maps while she listens to the hum of her phone.    
  
‘Yes?’ His voice, _that_ voice, says and she’s five, she’s seventeen, she’s dead and under a pile of floorboards, in her bed covered in blood, on the ice and screaming. It hits through her like a freight train and for the first time in so very long she is small and powerless and drowning in fear. ‘If this is a prank call, Camicheal, I will have you killed.’  
  
She hears _kill_ and drops the phone, screen cracking and light flickering off. She falls like the phone does, cracking and lights going out. Her legs don’t work. Her arms are too heavy. There’s someone calling her name and suddenly there is Louisa’s thin wrists and fingers, big scared eyes reflecting her face right back.  
  
‘I’m strong,’ she says. His hand is on her wrist, on her ankle, climbing near her skirt. Her mouth tastes like grass and blood. Laura is screaming, she’s always screaming, the house is always burning. He never goes away. Not really. Why can she never remember that? ‘I could kill him. I’m strong. I’m crying but I’m- I could hurt him but I can’t-’  
  
‘Oh love.’ Louisa’s arms loop around her shoulders, holds on.  



	2. halcyon and bone

 

\--

Act II - Halycon and Bone

\--

The decision to open until eleven on weeknights is made mostly because a) Lydia’s sense of time is utterly fucked and b) Louisa is still somewhat confused by a town with only two bars within an hour drunken stumble. Three am comes and goes for a month with the occasional hipster cum vampire and failing high school student slyly sliding up to the counter for a refill before Lydia notices that this is not normal behaviour. Instead of a solution involving properly maintained sleeping patterns she scrapes the nine off the closing time and fills in an eleven. She usually makes sure everyone is gone by one am at the latest. Louisa accepts with a narrowed eye and a scowl that means she actually thinks it’s a really good idea and is resentful she wasn’t a part of it. They gain new customers, some of them unusual, and she finds herself making blood pudding once or twice just for her favourite dead eyed dirty blonde hipster vampires. They travel in groups. It’s kind of adorable.       
  
Lydia’s had all sorts walk through her doors. Demons, fae, professors, angels, personal trainers and accountants, minor gods. If it can walk and enjoys good food she’s seen it. It’s easy enough to pick out who’s who. So on the sixth Wednesday the same group orders the dirty chai and orange pomegranate scones something becomes readily apparent.  
  
There is a cult.  
  
And it has scones and jam at the _Lupis Lazuli_ at 8pm on Wednesday.  
  
She debates telling Derek for the length of time it takes to make layers of raspberry, lemon, and lime sponge, cut them into perfect geometrically pieces and stack and ice them into the shape of stars. Telling Derek means keeping on top of a potentially dangerous group of people. It also means dealing with Derek.  
  
The Beacon Hills Pack, all capital letters, is known for two things; it’s utterly ruthless approach to trespassing and it’s friendly policy toward the locals. If you’re not on good terms with the Alpha there’s no point being in Beacon Hills to begin with. You’ll probably end up with your guts lining a major highway. The police are in the know and the only law when it comes to the supernatural is Derek’s. Or more accurately, Stiles, but that’s a power struggle she wants no part of. To be honest this is all something Lydia wants no part of. Lydia is an exception, will always be one, and that allows her a fair bit of leeway when it comes to things like this. As long as it doesn’t get dangerous it won’t matter if she doesn’t say anything.  
  
As long as nothing happens everything will be okay.  
  
\--  
  
Someone tries to kill her on Saturday. It’s cyanide in the muffins. Like she wouldn’t smell that one coming. But immune, in her case, means _immune_ and she eats the muffin with a cough and heartburn.  
  
Again, on Sunday, belladonna in the water that Louisa used to wash the cutlery. They notice because Louisa remarks on the taste of her jam. It was good jam. Ginger and lime. They’re both sad to see it go.  
  
Monday and it’s a small bomb, which is welcome surprise actually, since Louisa’s wards disarm the thing before it can make it to the counter. It’s a nice afternoon dismantling it. Very calming.  
  
Tuesday brings a straight up curse which Louisa undoes with a swish and a flick of her fingers. Instead of electrifying her and turning her inners outer it turns the entire cafe an unsettling shade of plum and teal. They pretend it’s a special occasion.  
  
In the five years that Lydia has known Louisa a total of 23 people have tried to assassinate one or both of them. Louisa isn’t so much high profile as unbalanced and not living up to her full potential and Lydia is immune, smart, and willing to start fires. Magic draws the power hungry and the powerful do not like women who will not bend. It shocked her at first, how willing people were to kill. Then it got old and worn through. Now poison in her breakfast is sort of like being the 10,000 visitor on a website; it means something to the person handing it to you but it’s tedious to clear up and probably some sort of scam.  
  
‘We should do something about this,’ Louisa passes her a carton of eggs and a separator.  
  
‘Probably,’ she declines the separator; it’s easy enough to do by hand. Puts three egg whites into one cup and the yolks into another. ‘A hit?’  
  
Louisa tucks a lip between her teeth and shakes her head. ‘Your friend Stiles may look like puberty only gently grazed him, baby faced bastard, but he’s well within my weight class magically speaking. I don’t want to have to level up to beat him if we ruffle too many feathers.’  
  
Lydia thinks you can’t call someone a baby faced bastard if you’re actively interested in seeing their dick but then not everyone thinks the way she does. It would be easier if they did. ‘He’s really that strong?’  
  
Louisa raises an eyebrow. ‘You know that Scott kid who basically walks around looking at you like you personally make his day just by being around?’  
  
‘Louisa,’ she doesn’t want to think about it that way.  
  
‘The both of them are crazy powerful,’ she says quietly, ‘it scares the shit out of me.’  
  
‘We can leave.’  
  
‘You’d do that for me?’  
  
‘You left Canada.’  
  
‘I hated Canada.’  
  
‘You’d move to Chicago for me.’ Lydia mixes the eggs and the fine spun vanilla sugar, flour, spices, adds milk, and pours them into tiny little molds in the shape of wings, ‘it’s not like you’re lacking.’  
  
‘No, you don’t understand, there’s magic here all the time. I’m drowning in it. The woods and the water and all the fire that still lingers. It’s old and it doesn’t even make sense. A place like this shouldn’t exist. By all rights the bond-’ Louisa pales.  
  
‘Bond?’  
  
‘I never said that,’ Louisa’s voice gets low and very scared. ‘Do you get that, _I never said that_.’  
  
‘You never said it.’ She repeats, Louisa gets paler.  
  
There is an awkward silence, worry refusing to seep out of the air between them, until Louisa’s nails scrape across the marble top in time with the _ding_ of the opening door. A tall thin man in a dark long coat enters the store and takes a seat, back to the wall, in the furthest corner from the door. A strict thirty paces later and Scott comes through the door intentionally blocking himself so that the man in the corner see’s him. Louisa startles, hands cracking an egg. ‘Christ, shit, no not him, like we need that, just, I’ve gotta concentrate on this for a sec so I’ll just.’ She gestured helplessly at the ingredients and the bowl. Lydia shrugs and goes to the front. Scott walks around the room stopping to talk to a group of old women. Lydia makes two espresso shots into a takeaway cup and puts a smack of brandy and cream on top. The man in the corner has eyes level on Scott, not even trying to blend in.  
  
‘You’re orders at the end of the counter.’ She says loudly. Everyone in the room turns to stare.  
  
Scott paces to the counter deliberately slow, like he’s avoiding spooking a wild animal. ‘You had it prepared?’  
  
‘I notice patterns,’ she says flatly, ‘that’ll be 2.50.’  
  
‘Discount.’  
  
‘You’re here literally every day.’  
  
‘I like the acknowledgment.’  
  
She smiles, catches it, and let’s it linger because why not, right? ‘That’ll be 2.50.’  
  
He shells out a generous tip. ‘Louisa still here?’  
  
‘Are you asking for you?’  
  
‘You know, Stiles has gotten better at the whole romance thing. More subtle.’  
  
Scott smiles, jaw line shifting, widen his stance. Lydia manages to turn her eye roll into something kinder. ‘There is a life size ice sculpture of Louisa filled with roses ruining my carpet upstairs.’  
  
‘It could have been half a jewellery store and a flat screen TV.’ The thin man makes a break for the door. Both Lydia and Scott sigh. ‘See you later.’  
  
She watches him through the window, tattoos spiking across his skin and knitting into coloured fur on his face; gracefully changing forms.

\--

  
When the sun is settling lower and the garbage has piled up too high, low rotting stench filling the evening air, Lydia takes a break behind the building. Cigarette, book, and teacup in hand. In the quiet she hears a quick word, profanity, the slide of a shoe on wet pavement. If she were any other girl that would be very frightening. She compromises by drinking her tea more slowly.  

In her head she can hear Allison’s voice saying that an alley is the perfect venue for two types of killing; snipers and extreme close range. Mid range attacks are far more noticeable in general and nearly impossible to pull off quietly. Allison can, Lydia’s seen it, which really just attests to the difficulty. Right now Lydia is either three seconds from a headshot and existing as some sort of Schrödinger cat or in six seconds someone is going to knife her. Either way she is in _some_ sort of peril. 

Lydia puts out her cigarette, sips her tea, and resumes reading while she waits for an answer.

It comes a neat half minute later when a knife smashes her teacup to pieces. Mid range, huh.

‘ _Nous protéger d'en haut_.’ Lydia hisses under her breath.

‘Oh come on, that old prayer?’ A voice, male, says, ‘no heavenly protection for girls like you.’

The handle of the mug is still in her hand, she drops it and faces where the knife came from. ‘This isn’t very subtle.’  
  
A man dressed in dark clothes, carefully average in the way you only get with magic, emerges from whatever magic cloaking he was using. Sharp blue eyes, vacant, he doesn’t expect much from her. ‘You’re the Martin girl, yeah?’ He says. His hand rubs across his nose as he looks her up and down. Lydia’s pretty good at reading people’s reactions to her. This guy is bored and sceptical. Good.  
  
‘You’re the useless assassin, yeah?’ She lets her fear show a little. Just enough to mask the way her eyes are darting around looking for a weapon. One of the old fire extinguishers they gutted from the dentistry is lying beaten and battered a metre away. She slides toward it a little. The book is trembling in her hands.  
  
The guy smiles and produces a long curved knife, blade blinking in the light. ‘Dance with me?’  
  
Lydia risks another half step bringing her just within reaching distance of the extinguisher. ‘At the risk of being a cliché I just want to confirm that you are absolutely here to kill _me_ specifically.’

‘There a lot of killing going around in this town?’

Lydia shrugs. ‘Could be?’

‘Yep.’

She steps forward, still moving toward the extinguisher. ‘Would you consider coming in for a cup of coffee instead?’

‘Nope.’

She sighs. ‘Can I know why?’

He pops his shoulder, ‘you’re inconvenient to a lot of people.’

‘Isn’t that always true.’ Lydia huffs, ‘any offer I could make that would make this stop?’

‘No _pe_.’ He pops the last syllable, he’s sure he’s got her, ‘gotta make a living, you know?’ The knife flicks between his fingers. Old blood flickering on his skin, on his chest. Lydia sucks in a breath, tilts her chin up. She throws the book at him and uses his surprise to grab the fire extinguisher. He recovers quickly and leaps forward just as she pulls the pin.  
  
‘Of course,’ she raises the fire extinguisher, aims for the eyes, fires.  
  
\--  
  
‘I am not Buffy Summers,’ she lifts a hand gently for Louisa to look over. The skin on her knuckles is all but scraped off and her fingernails are wrecked. She can see the plum of one painted nail hanging from her nail bed.  
  
‘Of course not.’ Stiles says from where he’s putting his own blood on to the doorway of the shop. ‘You’re a _strawberry_ blonde.’  
  
‘You’re not whoever the fuck the lesbian best friend is.’  
  
‘I dunno, I could swing the season 4 two step.’ Louisa says with a grin. She sticks her tongue out and, ew, licks Lydia’s knuckles until the skin heals over pink. Witches are unsanitary. Stiles produces a small pot of Witch Butter. It’s pinkish and thick and fills the room with an unmistakably herbal stench. Lydia has no idea what’s in it but she’s never met a witch who didn’t have a pot on them. Louisa takes a thick goop, spits in it, then rubs it across the wound. ‘In case of magical infection.’  
  
‘And nobody is the bumbling funny guy best friend who is secretly a deep and unrelenting asshole.’  
  
‘I resent that,’ Stiles says in his deep ‘spell chanting’ voice, which vis a vis Louisa, Lydia knows adds ambience not power.  
  
‘No Xander’s, got it.’ Louisa holds up an indeterminate number of fingers. ‘How many fingers?’  
  
‘A dodecahedron.’  
  
‘Not a number,’ Louisa shrugs and goes over to Stiles with the express purpose of stealing his blood covered knife, ‘you probably won’t die.’

This, she knows, is some sort of shock. Her fingertips and toes feel like they’re packed in cotton wool. Her throat is dry no matter how much she swallows. Her concentration is dipping in and out all while a small part of hind brain screams _pay attention._

‘What happened to the man?’ Lydia asks absently. She remembers hitting him with the fire extinguisher after. Actually, she may have hit him a lot. It’s starting to fade away at the edges. The space where the thoughts should be fill with melancholy and the sharp smell of blood rushing through her nose. She’s afraid of the memories already.  

Stiles shrugs. ‘We ate him.’

Lydia rolls her eyes. ‘I can never tell when you’re joking about stuff like that.’

‘Not often enough,’ Louisa supplies.

‘I’m going to bed.’ Her head tells her that that’s probably a terrible idea. Stiles and Louisa shrug together and casually exchange bodily fluids.  
  
She stumbles up the stairs and drops her clothes all over the floor. Goes into the ensuite, turns the shower up as hot as she can stand it and steps in. If she looked in the mirror she’d probably see the damage; she can feel the hot bruises in her skin, the scrapped skin, his blood dried up behind her ears. Her hands get tangled in her hair when she tries to undo the knots so she sits down and just lets the water hit her instead. Eventually the water runs a little less than scalding hot. Pretending to be okay is not working. She dries her hair, washes and moisturizes, ties her hair up to sleep. A pair of green and gold pyjamas is draped across her pillow. The smell of fresh cookies and hot milk wafts from a small tray sitting outside her door. She opens a notepad and jots down some numbers. Stops when all it does is make her agitated. The numbers will be different when she wakes up. The part of her that is still five and still believes that magic comes from wishes and hope and not sacrifice, blood, bone, and sheer will wants to curl around this moment and bury it inside herself so she can’t wake up. There are other ways to achieve that end and she has long since stopped considering them.  
  
She eats, she tucks herself around the promise of inevitability, she sleeps.  
  
Before the sun can swallow the night Derek is banging against Louisa’s wards, the alarms in the building making wolf like indentations ripple across the walls. Louisa is up already in her underwear and a loose shirt, the fire looping around her body ringing the floorboards charred and black. The surprise is Stiles long scarred back trailing after her dressed in loose pants, hair mussed. Louisa stands the door, hands twitching, Stiles steers Lydia by the shoulder into the kitchen and hands her a few mugs from the washing up.  
  
She makes a cup of tea. Stiles nonchalantly butters and jams a few slices of toast. His eye swinging between the knife in his hands and Louisa’s shirt scrunched up above her ass. ‘You knew it was going to happen.’  
  
‘What’s he waiting for?’  
  
‘I made him a key. A foolproof way to get in here,’ he shrugs when she scowls at him, ‘it’s my job.’  
  
‘Then why isn’t he in here?’ Louisa says mockingly.  
  
He smiles without it reaching his eyes, lowers his voice so only Lydia can hear it. ‘I was in love with you for years. A childs definition of love, too simple to be real. Some of that sticks around. I was on that field too. I saw it and I can understand why you’d never come back for the same reason you’d know why I could never leave.’ And then louder, ‘Louisa is the first person in my league to pass through in years. Gotta give you a running chance.’  
  
Louisa looks touched, which is sickening. The walls creak and the shadow wolves on the wall move faster. Louisa frowns. ‘He’s not trying very hard.’  
  
‘Maybe he’s being polite.’ Stiles says flatly.  
  
‘From a _wolf?_ ’ Louisa says despairingly, ‘breaking into a witches house?’  
  
‘ _Scott’s_ polite.’ Stiles does something with his hands and the food mess disappears. ‘He’s always been polite.’  
  
It feels like some sort of barb directed at Lydia. ‘No one said otherwise.’  
  
‘That comment wasn’t for you.’ Stiles face is impassive. He smiles again. Lydia would take points off his technique. ‘This will be fun.’

Louisa steals Stiles piece of bread. ‘Intimidation?’

Lydia nods. ‘Fire.’

Stiles butters another piece of bread. The smell of the woods lifting off his skin just as much as the stench of fire rolls from Louisa.

Derek, eventually, sticks a clawed hand through the door. He pushes it off its hinges a moment later. His anger beats against everything in the room.  
  
Lydia sighs. ‘There was an assassination attempt. Five, actually.’  
  
‘You didn’t tell me.’ Derek’s eyes brighten with anger. ‘One of the terms of your staying here-’  
  
Lydia raises an eyebrow. ‘Did I sign a form without knowing? There are no terms.’  
  
‘I could kick you out of this town.’ Derek growls, claws slicing out. It’s a testament to Derek’s growth that the noise he makes manages to fight past her defences and into her hindbrain. She’s aware he’s dangerous but she’s only just starting to believe it. The fire looping across Louisa’s skin triples until it begins to suck the oxygen out. Stiles tries to dampen it; the scent of wood smoke burning up the room. Louisa licks her lips and the fire grows faster. Stiles backs down slowly, cheeks grey, fingers clammy and twitching. Louisa is much, much, much stronger in a fight.  
  
Derek’s face is pensive when she turns to him. Lydia smiles, sweetly. ‘You’d have to _make me_ and I am a lot more dangerous than you think.’  
  
The room fills again with magic, with fire.

This is cruel, she knows, but she _cannot_ be threatened in her own home. She’s fought so damn hard to have anything be entirely her own she will not give it up to some half cocked asshole. Derek tenses, deliberately calm, deliberately okay even with the room basically on fire around him. It’s cruel, but he has to _know_ that he can’t threaten her. 

When the beginnings of real terror flash behind his eyes Lydia signals for Louisa to stop. Derek falls to a knee and coughs harshly, she can see the change ripple over him as he fights to control it. Next to her Stiles leans heavily on the edge of the counter, draws air into his lungs too quickly. Within a minute Derek is on his feet again and shifting properly into that weird eyebrowless half stage. 

‘We are going to meet,’ Derek says, ‘every week until you start trusting me.’  
  
Lydia snorts. ‘No.’  
  
Derek’s shoulders hunch, his neck twitches. ‘You’ve lived in other towns like this. You know how the game works. Play it.’

She knew something like this would happen before she got here. It’s never safe to be a woman and even less safe to be Lydia Martin. She needs Derek’s support or at least his indifference. If this had happened at any other time it would have been easy, as is she’s on high alert, her safe spaces have been irreparably breached, and she has never been as a furious with another living being as she is with Derek Hale right now. How dare he come into her house and demand things.

Louisa meets her eyes and flicks her thumb. If she gave the right signal right now Derek Hale would burn up right in front of her. Beacon Hills would fall with one gesture. She has power and that fact in and of its self allows her to think around the rage. She needs Derek. She need’s his support. Giving up a small measure of her time to gain his trust and or secrets is worth it.   

Lydia lets her decision flow into her body language in tony increments. ‘Public area, only once a week.’

‘Fine.’ Derek hisses out. ‘We’re leaving Stiles.’

Stiles shrugs, kisses Louisa on the cheek, walking quietly out behind Derek. A few minutes later a car starts down the block.

‘We should open the windows,’ Louisa says, sitting heavily on a chair. It creaks under her weight.

‘I can do that.’ Lydia moves to the windows.

‘Tell the puppy dog he can come in now.’ Louisa says before slumping in her seat and resting her head on her hands.  
  
Lydia throws open a window. ‘What puppy?’

Louisa mumbles into her arm, ‘ _Lahey._ ’

Sure enough when Lydia looks out the window again a tall blonde figure is leaning against the wall of a building across the street. It looks like he’s talking to himself.

‘Unbelievable.’ Lydia mutters as she grabs a jacket and goes outside. ‘This _town.’_

Isaac doesn’t so much as glance at her until she’s standing a foot away. He’s muttering in Irish to the air next to him looking for all the world like he hasn’t got even the first beginnings of a care. He laughs at something the air says and cuts his eyes sharply to her. Like she’s inconveniencing _him_. ‘Why on earth are you here?’ She says.  
  
Isaac shrugs. ‘Derek’s worried about you.’  
  
‘I’m worried about the self righteous stick he’s got jammed up his ass but you don’t see me blackmailing anyone.’  
  
‘You got meaner.’  
  
‘No,’ she says dryly, ‘is there any way I could make this happen faster? Or is Derek’s new routine glacially placed annoyance?’

‘That’s sort of the old one too.’ Isaac shrugs again. ‘I’m enjoying a break.’

‘Looks like a stake out.’ Lydia cocks her head. ‘Does leather chafe?’

It’s a very weak effort. Lydia’s exhausted and Isaac Lahey should _be_ very little effort. He smiles brightly. ‘I haven’t worn a leather jacket in six years, or terrorised a teenager, or been arrested. You’re a scientist, well, you _tried_ , right?’ The barb hits dead on. ‘Right. The game has changed. Your math is flawed.’

‘So Derek said.’

Isaac laughs cruelly. ‘So maybe he’s right.’  
  
Isaac leaves with the last word. That might be the part of the last 24 hours she’s most mad about.

\--

On April 23rd, 2013 things begin to fall apart.

Lydia Martin is dragged from her bed by a radical pro human group and taken to a remote facility. This takes six hours. In that six hours Allison Argent, political playing piece and spymaster-to-be, is pulled out of remote wilderness training and deployed to rescue Lydia at any cost. In the three hours it takes Allison to get into the medical facility eight people, all supernatural of some description, are injected with what the radicals hope is a cure all for supernatural affliction. They injection is, for eighteen hours after that, a resounding success. They immediately green light the injections to a dozen other facilities located across the United States all of which are carrying large numbers of supernaturals in various states of physical and emotional wellness. Allison saves Lydia.

As the eighteenth hour slips into the nineteenth the cure breaks down. Slowly and surely everyone who was injected with it suffers violent hallucinations. The lack of preparation coupled with the sheer magnitude of the situation forces several old hunter families to tell law enforcement and government agencies about what lies behind the curtain. The reactions are extreme.

On November 23rd, following the massacre of one of the oldest continuing hunter family lines, the burning of supernatural safe Houses, and the emergence of Scott McCall and Stilinski as Big Damn Heroes in the crisis following April 23rd; Allison Argent is appointed the head of the last ‘great’ hunter line. She calls for an armistice lasting three years in which both sides will agree to talks. The prevalent hope is that new blood will end millennia old feuds.  

On December 31st the first of several meetings is attended by a delegation including Stiles Stilinski,  calls into question the Argents right to stand as the unofficial head of the Hunters. Allison calls for a confidence vote which she wins by a tiny margin due to a last effort minute to turn the liberal section in her favour. This immediately raises suspicion with conservative factions. In the same meeting Stiles Stilinski is put on trial for magic violations so severe no one outside of the courtroom even knows what they were. His trial is never concluded.

On December 31st, three minutes before the clocked ticked over into a new year, Chris Argent is assassinated; his body is mutilated into the form of a rat, and posed outside Allison Argents room.

The Armistice ends on January 1st 2014\.       

\--  
  
‘Jesus,’ Scott says through a peel of laughter, ‘really? He’s still doing that?’  
  
Lydia raises an eyebrow. They’re leaning against the wall outside the shop so Lydia can smoke and Scott can unsubtly pretend he isn’t guarding her. Lydia’s apron is covered in flour, there’s raspberry plastered to her jeans. It sort of looks like she’s killed someone. Scott’s been nursing the same coffee for the entire time, not out of place with the neat button down and pants but completely out of sync with the obvious bag of herbs and knife strapped to his thigh. They definitely look like they’ve killed someone.  ‘Still?’  
  
‘He, uh, camped outside my house for a week until my mom took pity on him and made him dinner. Of course, she drugged it with the werewolf equivalent of truth serum and grilled him on his intentions. After that she fed him some non-drugged food and kicked him out.’ Scott smiles at the memory. ‘The Sheriff shot his car. He regretted it later when he had to do the paperwork.’  
  
‘I see.’ Lydia hits the butt of her cigarette, drops it, lights another. ‘I could always drop some of my hair into his coffee.’ She muses. Scott gives her an odd look.

‘Poisoning doesn’t really solve problems.’

‘We don’t appreciate that kind of attitude here; in fact some witches would find it down right offensive.’

Scott’s mirth fades, ‘Louisa’s traditional.’

‘No flashy new age shit with her.’ Lydia nods, ‘Stiles is too.’

‘Has to be.’ Scott says softly. ‘I worry about him.’

Lydia snorts. ‘He’ll be fine. Witches are the supernatural equivalent of cockroaches. They’d probably think the apocalypse is fun.’  
  
He sighs. ‘How’d you met Louisa?’  
  
‘Really?’ Lydia rolls the question in her head. _Why is he asking? Is he asking for Stiles? Is this a background check?_ Scott’s not the type for deception when he doesn’t have to be.  
  
‘Yeah.’ It’s with the same soft voice he used to talk about Stiles, that more than anything lets her talk.  
  
‘Allison.’ She pauses for reaction. Scott rolls his eyes and waves for her to continue, ‘how much do you know about her work?’  
  
‘She’s a spymaster in training.’  
  
Close enough. ‘She’d just finished one of her main courses in Australia. Hardcore survival course, three days 100kms out of Alice Springs with the bare minimum of survival gear.’

‘Fuck.’

‘Yeah. Fuck. Fourteen went out, six came back. Allison told me they had to put down one of the other four. Said he developed,’ the memory comes spinning back into focus with a force that leaves her breathless; Allison showing her pictures of dead, desecrated bodies. Organs spilled on the floor like spoiled food, ‘developed a ‘taste for perverse acts’. He’d snapped. Started Hannibal Lector-ing his werewolf kills.’

‘Christ.’

‘Allison said you could see the madness in him, like he wore it. Like he thought it would protect him.’ Hearts on the table. Mangled bones in a pestle. Rows of teeth across the floor spilled like marbles.

Scott shakes his head. ‘Hard times. Makes you face your humanity.’

‘No. That wasn’t it.’ They are human, despite the world’s insistence on monstrosity. ‘I went because Allison called me and she never calls me.’

She’d found Allison in a non-descript motel on the edge of town, a bottle of absinthe in one hand and a wound on her side. She’d laughed, high and fevered, said, ‘the fucker got me before Javier could put a nail through his skull. I remembered he was a trap expert too late; he’d cornered us and put nails through three of my men before I could get a shock collar on him. Christ, he _bit me._ On the _side._ ’ The wound had swelled up that night; grown into an ugly scar Allison had taken to showing off, daring anyone to look her in the eye about it.    

Lydia shakes the memory off. ‘There’s about a day there I’m not sure about, we we’re pretty wasted, but there was a lot of uproar down there about the treaties being reformed. Allison’s visibility had helped a lot to quell the more conservative populace. Let them think the Argents were back to sitting centre-right.’ It was a patch to a deeper problem and a situation Allison hated. ‘We went into the wrong bar. We didn’t know but there’d been a riot, freelance hunters, dumb kids who couldn’t have been more than seventeen went into Chinatown and busted up one of the old Houses. Morons didn’t even check who owned the place. Walked right into a huge gathering of covens from all around the world. Half the bloody Coven Transcendent and they brought guns.’ The media had spun it into a story about racial tensions; it hadn’t even been much of a lie. ‘Needless to say things weren’t hunter friendly.

‘So me and Allison walk into a bar, get a drink, start a round of pool and realise that the bar is full of angry women who could kill us with a paper cut. We fought. We lost. They rounded us up, had us kneel at the front of the room like you would for an execution and began voting on the worst way to kill us. Pretty imaginative too, you know witches. There were three women who voted against killing us. They called themselves the Adisa on account of their real name being untranslatable in the way only really powerful stuff is. Their leader, Ekundayo, is the most terrifying woman I’ve ever seen. Her magic spreads out from her like water and when she talks you want to weep. She said she promised a favour to Allison’s mother years before and now seemed like the time to pay up. In fact that was the entire reason they’d been there in the first place.’

\--

Ekundayo had stood at the front of the room, a dark skinned figure with gold woven into the long braids that framed her face, fire spitting lazily behind her. At her sides she was flanked by Louisa and their third coven member Afra, a woman of mixed descent who was lazily trailing her fingers through the stone.

‘Would anyone like to defy me?’ Ekundayo says, she turns and smiles at an old women twirling a clover in her hand, ‘not even you, Abby, you goddamn hack?’

The woman she identified as Abby sighs as she leans back, rustling her greyed hair and cracking the deep wrinkles in her skin. ‘These girls worth restarting a coven war, Adisa?’

Ekundayo snarls. Everyone in the room, even her coven, tenses. ‘You know who the brunette is, Abhainn, don’t fuck around.’

‘Kill the redhead.’

‘She’s immune.’ Ekundayo all but purrs over the last word, ‘and whip smart, if her mind is any indication.’

Lydia’s eyes snap to Ekundayo’s and all at once she can feel the foreign presence in her head. She screams in her head, maybe if she makes enough noise she’ll leave. Ekundayo’s grip in her head grows knives and Lydia can feel bile crawling into her throat.

‘You can scream all you want, hun, I’m stronger and faster and I don’t give two shits about the secrets you’ve got up in there.’ Lydia tries to think through the noise. Ekundayo snorts. ‘Oops. Where we pretending you weren’t from Beacon Hills?’

Lydia stops trying to push her out. Tries to make herself as small as possible in her own head. Ekundayo releases her mind with a gentle pat on the head and what feels like a mixture of amusement, admiration, and admonishment.

‘You’re Lydia, I read about you.’ Afra says pleasantly. ‘You were _such_ a tragedy.’

It’s the admiration Lydia gets stuck on. Slowly she turns it into anger. ‘I’m sure I was.’

‘How much for her skull?’ A woman towards the back of the room says, ‘maybe you could lick the immunity off.’

‘I want the liver.’ The man sitting next to her says, ‘maybe her body thinks magic is a disease. We could liquefy and bottle it. Perhaps it would cure dizziness.’

‘Brain.’ Another voice. ‘It would be in the brain.’

‘Uterus. Magic grows, you dumbasses.’ The first woman says.

‘Endocrines then, flash fry the glands.’ The man says.

‘Are you done fear mongering?’ The other woman by the fire says sighs out. Fire is spindling up and over her wrist, bleeding into her skin like it’s always been there. ‘I’ve got other places to be.’

‘Louisa.’ Ekundayo says with false sweetness. ‘We must be nice to those lesser than us.’ Lydia can feel the brush of Ekundayo’s will against her mind, she pushes back with her anger. Ekundayo cuts her a small smile before she seems to grow impossibly large and commanding. Her magic pours across the ground and puddles around everyone in the room. Lydia’s immunity eats at it when it touches her. The room dims, every bit of light and dark magnifying Ekundayo until she’s the only thing in the room you _can_ look at. ‘You will not have any part of her that grows.’

‘Hair then?’ Comes a shaky voice from behind Lydia.

‘I suppose.’ Lydia tenses when Ekundayo yanks her hair up. ‘Oh calm down, girl, it will come back and no one will have eaten your liver.’

‘We’d consider it a terrorist act.’ Allison says warningly.

All the witches laugh. Ekundayo shakes her head and holds her hand flat to her chest, ‘you are not yet half the girl you would have to be to terrify women like us, Argent.’

‘You sure about that?’

Ekundayo tilts her head. ‘The only scary woman is one who knows terrifying loss. You have not seen the unseeable; don’t talk like you have to those who know better.’

‘There, there child.’ And it’s terrifying to be the focus of Ekundayo’s attention. The room is still hers, she is in command of everything. She feels Ekundayo curdle the fear in her brain, just reach in and stop it from growing. She looks around the rest of the room. In sections the entire place seems to calm down. It seems Ekundayo is in their heads just as much as she’s in Lydia’s. ‘You may leave now.’

Allison begins to open her mouth to argue.

‘No,’ Lydia says, ‘we’re _leaving._ ’

‘Your hair.’

‘She’s right.’ Lydia gets off her knees, ‘it grows.’

Allison rises too. ‘I’ll remember this.’

‘Well I would hope so,’ Afra drawls.

Neither Allison or Lydia talk until they’re a block away. Lydia’s skin is clammy. Allison doesn’t look any better.

‘Sorry about that.’ Allison whispers.

‘It’s hair.’ Lydia sniffs. ‘Besides any loss was worth the gain.’

‘How so?’

‘There’s a huge political divide between at least three of them. All of them are elementals, no psychics, so they’re probably one of those ‘purist’ groups. All of them where terrified when Ekundayo defended us. We know that. But terrified in a way that suggests it was unusual as opposed to a direct relationship to her power. She probably doesn’t get involved much.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘Everyone tensed, even her coven. If it was expected then that old woman never would have revealed that there had been a divide in front of an enemy. It was the dumb sort of mistake you make when you’re young or surprised and she is not young. Ergo, it was an unexpected action. They like you, by the way.’

‘How do you figure that?’

‘Am I the only one who reads?’ Lydia rolls her eyes, coming back into herself slowly. She can feel the tender spots where Ekundayo dug in like an open wound. ‘Witches like challenges to their authority, in fact their social hierarchy depends on it. The more fights that a witch gets into and wins the higher status they are. There are markers they carry, little gold dots that rest at the crown of their heads. You can see the way it reshapes their skulls. The three women who stood up for us had more than sixty between them. There are less than two thousand witches alive right now and only about one hundred who would be powerful enough to be in that room.’ Lydia sighs. ‘I would have made an excellent witch.’

‘Christ Lydia, do you ever turn it off.’

‘No, which is excellent for you because you seem intensely reluctant to educate yourself on things that will probably try to kill you. One of us should be ruthless.’

‘Let’s hope not.’ A familiar voice says from behind them. Allison has a weapon in her hand a second pivoting and launching in the next. Louisa smiles at her. ‘Calm down Argent, I’m just here to remind Martin of her debt.’

Lydia frowns. ‘Me?’

‘Sure,’ Louisa says brightly, ‘see, I stopped you from getting eaten which means at some point in the near future I’m going to need something from you.’

‘Like?’

‘Your skull,’ Louisa says with a mean smile. Allison tenses, drawing the thin blade she keeps wrapped around her wrist. Louisa shakes her head, ‘no, hospitality, it’s about to get very uncomfortable to be me. As you said we don’t get involved very much.’

If someone as horrifyingly terrifying as Ekundayo is willing to acknowledge Louisa as an equal she must be something and having something owe you one is an advantage Lydia can appreciate. Witches like favours.

Lydia nods and holds her hand out. ‘Deal.’

Louisa takes her hand, fire wringing both their palms and crawling underneath their skin. ‘Deal.’

\--

‘Six months later she turned up at my house with a duffle bag.’ Lydia shrugs. ‘She never moved out.’

‘Okay but that’s not how you became friends, right?’ Scott’s eyebrows furrow. ‘Like, I became friends with Stiles in kindergarten when a spider crawled onto my hand and I freaked out and threw it at him. It landed on his face so he started screaming, so I panicked and squished it onto his face.’ He waves his hands. ‘Guts everywhere.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’ Lydia rolls her eyes; she can almost remember watching this happen. Probably would if her memory wasn’t a series of potholes and misdirection.

‘More ridiculous then becoming friends because _you owed her one._ ’ Scott says disbelievingly. ‘At least mine has spider guts.’

‘It was practical.’ Lydia insists. ‘Louisa needed a place to stay and I didn’t want to owe them. We liked each other so we became friends. Plus she’s powerful and well connected.’ Scott continues to look scandalized. ‘It’s _efficient_.’

‘I’m sure.’ He says, ‘very sure.’

Lydia laughs. ‘Go away.’

‘I am.’ He drinks his coffee in one go, which, ew, ‘I’m going to go remind Stiles why we’re friends. I’m going to show him it wasn’t because of _efficiency_. We are going to go do manly brotherly things like hug.’

‘Squish a spider on him too, real romantic, keeps the bromance alive.’

Scott frowns lightly. ‘I think he’d like it. Witches, you know.’

Lydia just smiles.

\--  
  
Warfare is good planning and good luck. Lydia is pretty low on the latter but she’s got real talent in the former. Armed with three back issues of InStyle and a colour wheel she slides into the chair across from Derek at the local library. Derek’s already waiting with a heavy book; embossed German on the side. Hilariously, he has reading glasses.  
  
‘Summer or Winter?’ She drops the magazines on the table. ‘Very chic glasses by the way.’  
  
‘I don’t get involved with the courts.’ Derek turns the page with the sort of passive aggressive nastiness that belongs in high school chick flicks. ‘Belonged to my dad.’  
  
‘ _Very_ chic, then.’  
  
Derek blinks and scowls, turns the page with even more viciousness. Lydia hums to herself and cracks the spine on last month’s InStyle, settling in for a long campaign.     
  
Derek pulls out a notebook and starts jotting down shorthand. He has extraordinarily pretty handwriting.  
  
‘I think with your complexion we should go for bold colours, maybe a pinkish lip, you don’t seem to keep much colour.’  
  
Derek rolls his eyes and pulls out a yellow highlighter.  
  
‘This has been a great talk, I feel closer already.’ Lydia turns five pages, bending the pages for noise.  
  
‘It’s sort of an inconvenient time.’  
  
‘You organised this.’  
  
‘That was before I realised the deadline for this paper was tomorrow.’  
  
Lydia slaps her magazine on the table. ‘Really?’  
  
Derek scowls. ‘Did it occur to you that maybe things have changed in the ten years since you _ran away?_ ’  
  
‘Excuse me?’  
  
‘You _ran_ Lydia, and you’ve been running ever since. You have to face-’  
  
And whose family ruined her? Whose blood does he share? ‘You don’t get to say that to me.’  
  
‘Fine.’ he does look regretful, his face shrinks into it like it’s old and worn. ‘But unless you’ve got some great insight into 18th century German architecture I’m not interested in talking to you right now.’  
  
‘Fine.’ Lydia picks up the magazine again. ‘I don’t even want to be here.’  
  
‘Tough luck.’  
  
‘You don’t want to be here.’  
  
Derek rolls his eyes and pointedly highlights all over his book.

Without meaning to her hands clench against the table. Dr Kilton always used to say she was like a wounded predator, a scrapper, willing and able to use anything and everything around her to win. It’s been years and years since someone last called her a survivor instead of a victim. Much longer since it was someone she trusted enough to believe. Beacon Hills makes her shaky unlike La Condamine or Perth or Port Elizabeth or anywhere else she’s called home in the decade since she left. She wants to think it’s the shakiness that’s got her off her game, that she’ll get it back if she can just get her feet under her. It was easier before when Lydia Martin meant Beauty Queen and Head Bitch. Easier to smile under a spotlight and pretend that that was who she actually was. Now she’s Lydia Martin Bakery Owner, and Derek’s completely ignoring her; he’s not afraid or guilty or any easily manipulated emotion.

Men are dumb. Lydia knows this like she knows stiletto heels have a perfect wear pattern that only lasts for about a month and redheads should only pull out the green sparingly. Men are dumb and the thing most of them want is vulnerability without having to lower themselves to the actual act of being vulnerable. They want to be in a relationship with at least one other entity in which they can feel secure. It doesn’t particularly matter if the security is bought with negativity or positivity. It can be achieved by love or admiration or fear. Or if you’re a lifelong alpha fuck up, the consideration and respect of those you see as reliant on you. Lydia has a road map of Derek’s personal pot holes. Some of them are simple _humanity_ ; he wants a family, a home, a good meal, and a safe place to hold secrets. Some of them are more complicated; he wants a simpler path ahead one not sullied by both his own mistakes and family histories, he wants a prosperous but above all safe territory. The simple and the complex are rarely compatible.

Lydia can offer a measure of stability, if she wants to. She can offer another ace in his pocket, another avenue of both resources and power. She has a _lot_ to offer. Derek has to be cognizant of this on some level otherwise why bother doing this? That he’s so immediately dismissive of her is troubling. Lydia is the furthest thing from stupid. She knows that Derek only cares what she does for political reasons. Scott’s fascination with her is born at least partially out of a need to protect the heart of a revolution. Stiles is harder to pin down but she suspects from the look he gave her when they saw each other for the first time that whatever Machiavellian bullshit he’s pulling has very little to do with her at all. Lydia is very aware that she is sitting in the engine of a war machine seconds from the first march. This is not where she wants to be at all. War Casualty is not the title she’s aiming for.

‘This isn’t the best way to get what you want.’

He looks up, eyes red tinged. Maybe not as dismissive as she thought. ‘What would be?’

‘I’m a resource. I have connections to various groups all around the world. I’m fluent in several dead languages, all of which are useful. I’ve lived here before, I know the history, I will eventually end up being a respected member of this community,’ _I am the only person you know whose call Allison would answer_. ‘And I’m me. The last one is the most important.’

‘Maybe I don’t need you.’

‘Maybe you’re an idiot.’ Insufferable. The writing is on every wall and blaring across every channel. _This is it, this is the big fight._ ‘This is not about _need_ Derek. This is about _preparation_.’

‘Do I have something to prepare for?’

Jesus fucking- ‘We all do. You know that. Everybody knows that.’

‘Tell me Lydia, have you picked a side?’ He says warningly. Lydia doesn’t roll her eyes through sheer force of will. ‘Humanity or your family?’

Lydia narrows her eyes. He thinks he can get her to declare an allegiance. She almost did. Misstep, easily corrected. ‘I won’t have to.’

Derek licks his thumb, turns a page. ‘Then why did you come back?'

Stalemate. Derek will insist on more of these meetings and he will undoubtedly think he’s winning them. For now it’ll go better if she backs off.

Lydia smiles, the one calculated to make her look sour, like she’s weak. ‘Would you say you’re a plum or an aubergine?’  
  
\--

The last of her mail is forwarded.

There’s a bill for her last appointment with her therapist. Lydia is honestly tempted to just rip it up. It’s not like she’s ever going back and there are much deadlier concerns on the horizon then a few errant dollars. She tucks it into the edge of her vanity and stares at it every day for a week.

Lydia doesn’t _like_ therapy. If left to her own devices she’s perfectly capable of compartmentalizing it all into neat boxes and opening the boxes as appropriate. Hell, she forgets the worst of it and if her head, her brilliant, gorgeous, _amazing_ head, says it’s not worth the space who is she to disagree? The world is concerned with appearances and as long as Lydia can walk the walk who cares if she’s a bunch of broken glass sown into perfect accessories and lip gloss.

You are what you look like. 

Except sometimes that’s not enough. Sometimes she’s more jagged pieces that person. Sometimes _his_ breath whispers across her skin, draws too tight across her legs, breaches her too fast and leaves her with a rip in her stockings, the glass of her spilling out. Times like that she turns to the safe places she’s built, the ones Dr Kilton taught her to build, and if there are more like him out there maybe she should grit her teeth and just do it.

Lydia feels hard times ahead. There’s no point ignoring the things that could help her weather it.

The phone book and a thorough internet search yields nothing useful which was to be expected really, doctor patient confidentiality would have to be extreme. She gives in eventually and taps open her phone contacts, hovering over Scott’s name.

She listens to the dial tone and considers what to say.

Scott, apparently determined to meet no expectations, answers on the tail end of the second ring. ‘Hey.’

‘Hi.’ Oh, _eloquent_ , Martin, ‘Um.’

‘What do you need?’ he says pleasantly. She can hear the faint hiss of a stove.

‘You’re sort of the only person I can trust with this information but,’ the words feel gritty on her teeth, this is a _weakness._ ‘I need a therapist.’

‘Is that a matter of national security?’

‘Considering what I know about Allison and associates I’d say so. At least in this town.’

‘Morrell still practices.’

‘Scott.’ She sighs, ‘this is hard enough.’

Scott makes an apologetic noise. ‘Dr Hoang. He’s in the book and pro-Allison.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Are you okay?’ He asks seriously.

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘Because you just called me to ask for a therapist.’

‘I’m,’ words still like dirt, still enough to make her hurt, ‘considering my options.’

‘You can call me anytime.’ Scott says earnestly. It must be nice, Lydia thinks, to live in Scott McCall’s world where everything can be protected and anything can be solved by loving it hard enough. ‘You know that right.’

‘Yeah,’ she says, ‘sure.’

\--

Allison asks her to leave Beacon Hills twice. Once directly after the incident at the warehouse and the second time shortly after she and Stiles had taken a ‘human’s only’ road trip down to Texas for a magic convention. Lydia had declined preferring to stay home alone while her mother went _somewhere._ Stiles jeep had come rushing up the driveway at two am, Allison leaping from the car while it was still moving, yelling about how they had _no time_. Allison fights her way past Stiles and Lydia and upstairs into Lydia’s room.

‘What did you do?’ Lydia asks. Allison ignores her and stars throwing things into a bag, packing essentials. Lydia reached over and stopped her hand. ‘ _Allison._ ’

‘Run with us,’ Allison says too fast, ‘I can’t save my dad or Scott or anyone else but you, I could, I could keep you safe they wouldn’t- _oh gods_ , what have we _done_ , what have we-’

Allison picks up the half packed bag, throws Lydia’s only pair of hiking boots in, grabs Lydia’s hand and runs downstairs toward the car. Lydia manages to dig her heels in on the front step, the light outside casting shadows across Allison’s distraught face.

‘Allison, we go now or we don’t go at all,’ Stiles pulls her away from the light, Allison’s grip tugging Lydia out with them. Stiles peels Allison’s hand off. ‘Lydia will be safer by herself.’

‘No, no, we-’

‘We’re leaving. We have to.’ Stiles bodily tugs her to the car. ‘You’ll see her again.’

‘You’re a liar.’ Allison says even as she lets him strap her in. She drops Lydia’s bag on the ground, fingers still loosely grasping one handle.

‘So are you. In fact as of yesterday we’re something much worse.’ Stiles kisses her head and nods their leave to Lydia. Just as fast as they whirled in they’re gone again, Lydia’s bag spilling out her bra and her boots onto the driveway. The car cracks one of the pot plants at the front of her driveway. For awhile after Lydia used to walk to the end of her driveway and stare at it, tracing the edges and thinking of the opportunity she was glad to miss. At the time it seemed too crazy, too much like the madness that killed Jackson and did worse to her. She was happy enough to stay behind and go to college and not to run away with Allison’s terrified hands and Stiles dead eyes.

In retrospect it turned out to be something she regretted.

\--

Beacon Hills has expanded rapidly in the last decade to the point where any part of town is randomly and inconveniently going through huge structural changes. The market where she usually sources some of their more exotic ingredients from has moved four times since they set up shop. This week it’s clear out on the other side of town. Up until a few hours ago they had a car but Louisa had a run in which turned into a fight which turned into her setting the car engine on fire and throwing it at someone. Good news is that the guy isn’t dead bad news is that they don’t have a car.

Lydia checks the background of every single car dealership she could get to in the next three days. On the surface all of them look legitimate, no outstanding warrants, reprimands, or unexpected supernatural red flags. Dig deeper and it looks like all of them are owned at least partially by one company.

BayLaurel.

She knew that the company was involved but it seems like BayLaurel owns everything. Every business, every piece of land, every last scrap of Beacon Hills has the triskele stamped on it.

Lydia scowls at her phone as she punches in Scott’s number. He answers on the third ring. ‘Is every major source of income in town owned by BayLaurel?’

‘Well _hi,_ Lydia.’ Scott says amusedly. ‘Pretty much. We leave that stuff to Peter. Why?’

‘I need a car.’

‘You don’t want to order it in.’

‘Anyone with half a mind for politics would bug anything of mine they could get their hands on. It’s safer to find someone I can at least look in the eyes.’

‘True enough.’ 

He rattles off the name of a guy who lives close enough for her to walk over.

She goes after a late lunch of fresh smoked salmon and marinated eggplant. The wind is biting across her neck. The car dealership is second hand and aggressively bannered with sale signs, there are several men in suits walking around and showing off the cars. Sitting on top of a four wheel drive is a sign that says _cash only._ This is definitely legal. Lydia walks around undisturbed for awhile eyes glazing over car after car after car. The bright flare off a car in the back corner of the parking lot beckons her over. It’s the shine off of the windshield of a _hideous_ pick up, red paint flaking off at the bumper to reveal a deeper red underneath, an irreversible dent on the back right side above the wheel, two thin gold lines running from the handle of the driver’s side door and around the window.

Lydia is fascinated.

‘You don’t want that car.’ A pleasant woman in a tastefully printed floral dress suit says, ‘it’s a tank.’

‘How so?’ Lydia raises an eyebrow. The woman’s wearing a tag that says _Hi My Name is Kora! How Can Ashpo-Dealers Help You Today!_ More disconcerting is her too bright smile and the slight edge of coldness that seems to seep out of her. Generally speaking, you need to know about the things people don’t want you to know about.

‘That car has survived being dropped down a ravine, multiple wild animal attacks, and a spontaneous combustion or two. Outside the car of course.’

Huh, magically protected car. ‘If that’s not a turn off?’

Kora looks at her speculatively, ‘I’ll give it to you for cheap.’

‘Deal.’ Lydia says immediately.

‘Excellent,’ Kora smiles brightly, turning on her heels, ‘I’ll get the papers.’

Lydia leans against the car. It smells like vaguely soggy chips. The inside is covered in bright blue material; Lydia can feel the scratchiness from here. 

‘Christ this is an ugly car.’ She mutters.

Kora returns with the papers, a soft breeze seemingly trailing after her, ‘I got you a present.’

‘You didn’t have to,’ Lydia says as she reads over the agreement, ‘the car is enough.’

‘No it’s not.’ Kora produces a bumper sticker. A grey crown laurelled with flowers sitting atop a skull, underneath the skull the words _Iron Maidens_ sits in bright red print. Kora puts the bumper sticker on the back window. ‘There!’

‘Thank you.’ Lydia hands back the papers, ‘I’ll bring the money around later.’

‘I don’t think you’re careful enough,’ Kora says suddenly, ‘good thing this car’s so tough then, huh.’

‘I guess so.’ Lydia says slowly.

Kora nods to herself, ‘take the car now, pay by the end of the month.’ She pulls car keys out of her pocket and throws them to Lydia. Kora leaves, a warmth returning to the air that Lydia hadn’t really noticed was missing until that moment.

The car starts smoothly and once Lydia rolls down a window the smell disappears quickly. It almost seems to flow to a stop in front of the shop. She gives the steering wheel a pat. Outside a small group has gathered in front of her door, all of them staring at the car like it might come to life and attack them. Lydia communes with her new car for a moment before stepping out.

‘Wow that is an ugly car.’ Louisa says. Scott nods sharply in agreement. His back is tense, like he’s physically holding himself away from something. He very well could be with Derek standing next to him, only a little bit less tense.

Never let it be said that Lydia Martin doesn’t take her shots when they’re neatly lined up in front of her. ‘I thought you two stopped being weird around each other?’  
  
‘Each other? Yes.’ Scott says. ‘The almost certainly possessed pickup truck from hell camping in front of your place?’ He sighs. ‘It deserves weird, is all I’m saying.’  
  
Stiles rolls his eyes. ‘It’s just a car.’  
  
‘See? And who would know ‘evil magic’ better than these two?’ Lydia leans on the driver’s side door, tapping out a rhythm on the roof.  
  
Stiles and Louisa share uneasy looks. ‘We should still get it checked out.’  
  
‘And who do we call for that?’ Lydia knows the answer but making Derek uncomfortable is hilarious.  
  
‘Peter.’ Derek says sullenly, ‘I’ll do it.’  
  
‘He’s not touching my car.’  
  
Derek gets pink around the ears. Scott cuts in before he can something undoubtedly rude. ‘There’s a mechanic in town. She’s nice enough.’

‘Don’t let her bite you.’ Derek says meanly. He stomps off again after pulling Stiles to the side to talk about something.

Scott hands her the address and leaves as well. He and Derek go in opposite directions.

Lydia gets back in her car and drives into the metropolitan area of Beacon Hills. The mechanic is situated right next door to the yarn superstore, a rundown building with boarded up windows and a peeling front door next to a shining Grecian style building with a welcome banner still swinging lightly. Lydia finds a single pointed arrow directing her down an alleyway next to the mechanics. The alleyway opens up into a car parkway, a few cars parked around an a fire pit made from old scrap metal. There’s a fire going. The mechanics workshop is open fronted, car parts and sparks raining down from a suspended car. There are three women working on various things, all of them tall, willow limbed, and unusually blonde. One of them calls to the others in a language Lydia pinpoints as Slavic but can’t narrow down further. All three of them seem to glide towards her, all the same height, and all with the same face but for a freckle here or a few hairs there. Triplets. They’re sisters.  

‘The Alpha sent you.’ One of the triplets says. ‘Zie’s out back.’

‘Follow’ a different sister says. She cuts a path straight across the room, the stench of grease getting thicker as they go further in. Lydia is led through a door and into a heavily perfumed hallway the walls covered in fabric the same colour as the sky at midnight, peppered here and there by flickering lights. Lydia follows the blonde woman until she pauses by a door.

‘Zie is waiting for you.’ The blonde says, ‘we’ll attend to your car.’

Lydia nods, breathes deeply and curses Derek as she lets the breath go. The blonde leaves with a shake of her head, blonde strands of her hair glittering around her face. The door creaks as Lydia pushes on it, slowly opening into a room the same shade as the hallway. There’s a figure sitting in an arm chair, heavy boots crossed over an ornate rug. She’s going to have to cuff both Scott and Derek for misgendering because while the person in front of her is viciously androgynous and vaguely woman-like they are most certainly not conforming to any human idea of gender.  

Gods tend not to.

‘Interesting home.’ Lydia says without thinking.

‘Interesting.’ Zie says. ‘For someone so smart you are very brave.’

‘One can gain the other.’

‘Ah,’ zie holds up a too long finger, ‘no, the smart are always afraid because they can see how very useless they are. Fools are brave when they have no cause to be because they see only the goal, never the hands behind them. It’s your Darwin, you see. The brave die and the smart wither and the few that balance the two out prosper.’

‘Darwin wouldn’t agree with you. But then again, Darwin was just a man.’ Lydia hides a quick smile. Werewolves would have screwed his theory sideways.

‘And women know better?’

‘We have to.’

‘What a strange broken thing.’ Zie says, looking her directly in the eyes. ‘Your car, of course, I mean your car.’

Lydia swallows bile. ‘Of course.’

‘Yes.’ The mechanic nods. ‘Three days for the work and you will not pay me. Merely make a meal in our honour and have the witchling eat it. We will know.’

There is no _merely_ to that statement. ‘No names?’

‘Child,’ zie says suddenly frowning, ‘I could turn your meat to stardust and lick the few interesting bits of your brain from the cutting floor of the cosmos. I do not because it is messy and I have no wish to change fate. Do not push your path places it should not go.’

‘I imagine you wouldn’t give me a general direction?’

‘Up. Down. West. East.’ The mechanic says chidingly. ‘You were doing so well too.’

‘I’m very good at being good.’

‘Perhaps,’ zie smiles. ‘I have always liked maidens. Ah, women, I suppose, for you.’

‘Your daughters.’

‘Yes. Very useful things.’ Zie says absentmindedly. ‘Some of us meet up on Fridays; small business owners and the like. You should join us.’

Lydia reaches for a non committal answer. ‘If I have the time.’

‘If you have the time.’ Zie says with great finality.

Lydia stands still for a moment, unsure if it was meant to be a dismissal. Eventually the mechanic cocks an eyebrow. Lydia flushes. Dismissal then.

‘I think I shall like this war.’ Zie says. ‘A revolution lead from the hearth, how innovative.’

Lydia is sure she hears the mechanic laugh as she leaves. Without the blonde to show her the way out it takes her longer to get out of the hallway. She’s almost glad for the heavy smell of grease when she emerges into the workroom. The three sisters are sitting on her car, flipping tarot cards onto the hood. One of the sisters smirks at her and holds up The Fool. Lydia does not look at them again as she leaves the alleyway.

\--

Lydia cooks the meal and as the third day eases into a fourth her car appears, midnight blue.

Lydia makes Louisa eat it, she’s _not_ a fool. 

\--

‘Derek.’

‘Lydia.’

‘Still on German Architecture?’

‘It _is_ a degree.’

‘In that specifically.’ Lydia flicks her hand in a way that has annoyed people for decades. Looks at her nails. Taps her foot.

Derek doesn’t miss a beat. ‘Should we talk about yours?’

‘I’d love to,’ Lydia leans back in her chair, ‘do you want to start with bio-molecular engineering or plain old rocket science.’

Derek looks murderous.

Lydia shoves an errant curl back from her face. ‘I’ve been a woman my entire life, Derek. I’m smarter than you, more devious than you, and just plain meaner than you because I didn’t get a choice.’ And now for the kill. ‘We could make this whole thing a repetitive bore of stalemates or me soundly trumping you or you can just admit you need me.’

‘Want. We don’t need you. We _want_ you.’

‘There’s no difference.’

‘Yes there is. I’m not a fucking politician and I don’t want to play games here either. But we will keep doing this and we will keep having the same conversation until it sticks.’

‘What conversation do you imagine we’re having?’

Derek rolls his eyes and returns to his book.

\--

Six days pass and every day there’s a dead body in the papers. All of them are young, healthy, parts of the community. All of them are dead at the borders of Hale territory. Lydia knows the only thing they have in common was tea and scones at the Lapis Lazuli on Wednesdays.

She doesn’t open the paper on the seventh day.

\--

The Beacon Hills Ice Rink is twice as large as it used to be and at least six times as fancy.

It’s packed today, a combination of school holidays and a cheap Tuesday ticket meaning the floor is packed with people gliding and twirling. Lydia can’t see the ice for the blades cutting it. For that she’s grateful. Scott glides up to her easily, and hops up and onto the bench where she’s sitting. He holds out two ice cream cones.

‘Chocolate or vanilla?’

‘I have a waistline to maintain.’

‘You own a bakery.’

‘I own a _dining experience._ ’

It occurs, suddenly, that this is probably a _date._

Lydia takes the vanilla. ‘Why are we here?’

‘I like skating and I like you.’

‘Scott.’

Scott grins and says nothing for a few moments as he eats his ice cream. ‘If you need an ulterior motive it’s to show you off to the residents. Make sure they know you’ve got protection.’ Scott relaxes even further, attracting the attention of a few girls on the rink. Oddly, Lydia finds herself annoyed by that, ‘and I like you and I like skating.’

‘Okay then.’

‘Why’d you come back?’

She considers just outright telling him, if there’s one thing Scott McCall is it’s good with secrets and terrible when he thinks people are keeping them. If there’s one thing she doesn’t need it’s him and his heroic nature getting into her business.

‘You know about the Butterfly Murders.’ She shrugs to make him think it’s not a calculated admission. ‘It seemed safer to be here where at least we’d have some sort of protection.’

‘You’re involved in that.’ His eyes widen, ‘you’re the girls who didn’t die.’

‘Yes. We had to relocate somewhere safer.’

Scott snorts. ‘Beacon Hills being safer.’

‘You guys have done a good job. You’re completely terrifying.’

The silence grows oddly between them. Lydia finishes her ice cream and searches for what to say next.

‘That’s a good thing?’ Scott says blandly.

‘The only real security is being the scariest thing in the room or the one everyone thinks is weakest; which really just makes you the first thing. You are the scariest thing in this room.’

Scott doesn’t look convinced. ‘I wanted to go college. I’d gotten my math up and everything.’

‘Wasn’t worth it, trust me.’

Scott hops off his seat and holds out his hands. ‘Twirl?’

He pulls her out into the centre of the ice and twirls her. For a moment, as she curls her leg up and holds the spin, nothing hurts.

\--

It is absolutely oozing costumers when she gets back. Louisa must be going crazy.  

Apparently not, though, with the way Louisa accosts her the second she works in. Around her silhouette Lydia can see an exasperated couple waiting to pay and a group of teenagers tweeting each other and tanking their Yelp page.

Louisa crowds her up against one of the walls, hisses, ‘There are people following me. Siblings, blonde and brunette, look kind of incest-y.’

‘How can you tell be looking?’

‘The brother gets pissed when people look at her.’

‘Or maybe they’re related.’

‘Or maybe he keeps putting his hand on her ass.’

‘Huh,’ Lydia scans the room and finds the couple Louisa is talking about. Blond man, brunette woman, seated near the window, way too close together, ‘wanna bet on it?’

‘I’m right and you’re easy money.’

Lydia does closing and watches as everyone trickles out. Everyone but the siblings.

Lydia takes a plate of almond meal biscuits over and offers them a refill. ‘Are you leaving anytime soon?’

‘Oh.’ The woman says.

‘No.’ Her brother says. In the next moment he’s flowed to his feet and pulling at his side, a blade of light flashing into his hand. A moment after that the room is alight with the wood smoke smell of Louisa’s magic. Her magic eats his, the blade disappearing just as quickly as it came.   

‘What the hell?’ The man says.

‘Who are you?’ Lydia asks.

‘Jeremy and Evelyn Cavanaugh.’ Evelyn says, ‘ignore him. He’s an _idiot._ ’

Louisa lets her magic go. ‘Not your real name.’

‘Not our real _last_ name.’

‘Why are you here?’

Evelyn bounces on her toes. ‘We’d like to ask for sanctuary.’

‘From what?’

Jeremy makes air quotes. ‘The Butterfly Murder’s.’

‘You want to do that here?’ Lydia tilts her head, ‘in _Beacon Hills?_ ’

‘Worked for you guys.’

 Lydia lets all of her astonishment bleed into her voice. ‘Not really.’

Jeremy shrugs. ‘You’re not dead, that’s something you don’t have in common with a hundred percent of the other victims.’

‘So you thought us not dying was due to divine intervention or some sort of scheme.’ Louisa says, leaning lightly against Lydia.  
  
‘It’s more complicated-’ Evelyn starts. ‘Basically, yeah.’ Jeremy finishes.  
  
Lydia and Louisa share a look. ‘Luck.’ They say together.  
  
‘Oh.’ Jeremy shrugs again, the ease suggests it’s a motion he makes a lot, ‘can we stay anyway?’  
  
‘Sure why not?’ Louisa says sarcastically.

It’s not actually that terrible an idea, Lydia thinks, Louisa has them covered magically and both of them look too thin and brittle to rely on brawn. If they knew enough to find them there’s probably something to be gained from keeping them around.

Lydia turns so she has her back to them. ‘I can’t actually think of a reason.’  
  
‘Someone’s trying to kill them.’  
  
‘Someone’s trying to kill us, too.’  
  
‘We do not _help the helpless_.’  
  
‘Not without an exorbitant fee.’

Louisa’s face twitches and Lydia knows she has her. ‘This is ridiculous.’

‘We have space, they have information, and you can kill them later if you want.’

‘Real hospitable of you.’ Jeremy mutters under his breath.

‘You’re damn right it is.’ Louisa hisses.

Evelyn nods. ‘One night’s rest and we’ll give you information no further charge attached.’

‘You’re sleeping somewhere we can keep an eye on you.’ Louisa grins, ‘It may not be comfortable.’

‘That’s fine,’ Jeremy says, ‘we’ve seen worse.’

Jeremy is too thin; from a distance it looks deliberate or if you’re from a different sort of back ground, like years of drugs and running. Evelyn’s hair has a distinct lankness to it that makes her eyes seem huge in her face and her cuticles are thin and cracked. They have seen worse.

Louisa see’s it too. ‘This is a terrible idea.’ She remarks as they enter the kitchen under the guise of refreshments.

‘They’re killing the cult members.’

‘I noticed.’

‘The only power you have is in what you know.’ Lydia says in her best ‘holier than thou’ tone.

‘Shit,’ Louisa laughs, ‘I hate you.’


	3. the honourable herringbone house

 

\--

Act III - The Honourable Herringbone House  
\--

It started six months ago in the middle of peace talks between the Clarington-Templar’s, a group of extremist hunters, and the O’Hara’s, a clan of old god worshipers who had gained unprecedented political power through centuries of worship. After six days of argument on neutral ground the papers we’re drawn up, the clauses agreed on, and a thirty year renegotiation agreed to. It was possibly the politest any political meet had been in close to three years. Certainly the least bloody. On the last day, minutes before the first peaceful treaty between extremist groups in most of a decade would have been signed, the building burnt down.

Or rather, someone summoned something they couldn’t control and then set the building on fire when they couldn’t stop it.

The next week a Wendigo ate a bus of school children and the hunter’s acid bombed a peaceful group of Leshy protesting racial profiling. Peace talks never resumed.

The next morning they get Evelyn and Jeremy settled in a booth with tea and a lavender lemon biscuits, the soft aroma filling the space. Louisa wards them against everything she can think of and then some stuff she can’t. She comes back exhausted, pale and shaking, wounds healing sluggishly. Evelyn puts her tea down, balancing the weight on her finger so the cup doesn’t make a sound. ‘We were from the Herringbone House. It’s one of the oldest refuges for witches and other practitioners. We had numerous wards worked into the building, everything from protection to fire prevention to a little bell service that signalled for tea. We were the oldest House to make it though the Demolishing. The oldest left in our part of England. 600 years as a sanctuary for those of us who needed it most and it all goes up in smoke. From what we’ve,’ Evelyn pauses, finger trailing her wrist for a moment, ‘researched, you used to live in one of the larger communities in Canada. You operated something similar.’

‘Yeah,’ Louisa says, ‘sorry, but what does this have to do with us?’

Jeremy shuffles in his seat, sitting open legged and aggressive. ‘It was a summoning; botched completely, for a god so old it doesn’t have a recognisable name. It tends to use butterflies to manifest, obviously meant to signal change. Every so often a group tries and calls it up, usually newly formed neo-pagan types with tarot cards with angels and dolphins and not a lick of sense. It’s near impossible to manifest since it has no name and no physical house of worship. You can get a lot of things to come forth with some fresh blood or a virgin, depending on what ‘moral alignment’ you’re going for, but this thing has rejected all of them.’

Louisa matches her posture to Jeremy. ‘Again. Why us?’

Jeremy continues as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘As I said this entity has no defined purpose, no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ element, it’s just very powerful. There have been extremist groups on both sides trying to get it for months now. Mostly with dead girls and butterflies.’

Lydia shudders.

‘We know something they don’t.’ Evelyn sits up straighter, Jeremy clamps a hand on her shoulder.

‘Jeremy. Don’t.’

‘We don’t know where they stand,’ Jeremy shakes his head and nods to Lydia and Louisa in turn, ‘the wrong person and we’d all end up- ’

‘Neutral.’ Lydia says.

‘For now.’ Louisa adds. Lydia looks at her but her face isn’t giving anything away.

Evelyn smiles weakly. ‘It’s looking for a type of person. Someone with potential, who wants to change themselves but can’t. The lost. The old. The lonely. It’s looking for those who want to transform.’ She sits up straighter becoming more animated as she talks. ‘It’s ancient as well. It won’t go for new man made constructs the way gods in pantheons do and it hasn’t responded to any sort of ritual we’ve seen before. I know the Mścisław have been upturning graveyards and stealing the ribs off of children, real dark magic, and the long arm of the Argent clan-’

Evelyn stops immediately. The Argents are a topic everyone has an opinion on. It’s always the sort of opinion that makes or breaks a conversation.

Lydia weighs her options. Chooses truth. ‘We’re with the other Argent.’

Jeremy smiles approvingly. ‘So you do have a loyalty.’

Evelyn shoots her brother a contemptuous look. ‘The Argents have been stringing up every one they think has half a clue and torturing them until they’re useless. They caught up with one of the more powerful witches in Mumbai a week ago. Drove her so crazy she buried herself and three square miles under rubble.’ Evelyn shakes her head. ‘They can’t find it. No one can.’

Louisa visibly tenses, foot tapping against the floor. ‘Does this story have a point?’

‘Louisa.’ Lydia says warningly.

Jeremy smirks. ‘Little witchling have a problem?’

‘I could be one.’ Louisa straightens her back, an angry rush of blood coming to her cheeks.

‘Hot headed.’ He says amusedly. ‘What coven are you from?’

‘You’d find the real name unpronounceable.’ Louisa looks away from him, toward the windows and the dark night outside. ‘Adisa.’

Jeremy blanches and Evelyn makes a half gasping noise. ‘We’re sorry for your loss.’

‘And I’m sorry for the people in Mumbai.’ Louisa says quietly. Lydia takes her hand and threads their fingers together. Squeezing as if to say I know you and I love you. Louisa doesn’t squeeze back.

Evelyn continues. ‘And then it ended up in Canada. Hit one of the newer resistance compounds. We actually think that one was an accident.’

‘What?’ Lydia says. If one of Allison’s compounds got hit someone would have told her.

Jeremy shakes his head. ‘The compound was up near Alert, got hit pretty hard.’

‘Who the fuck would live there?’ Louisa hisses. ‘Fuck that, it’s the dead of winter all the fucking time there why would you bother trying to summon anything living?’

‘Well,’ Evelyn says wryly, ‘it did eat them.’

Lydia’s heart beats faster. ‘Do you know if Allison Argent was there?’

‘Nah,’ Jeremy says, ‘been heading south for a few months now.’

‘You think she’s coming here?’ Louisa says then amends, ‘back here?’

Lydia sighs. ‘It would be good if she was. We could use her help if this is as political as its sounding.’

‘Hope she knows how to put it down. There were what, fifteen cells in Canada? ’ Evelyn nods. Jeremy rolls his shoulders and continues. ‘We’re down something like seven now. We can’t hold Canada with that few.’

A territory the size of Canada with its resources and strategic location in complete control of anti-  
supernatural forces sounds like a recipe for disaster. Jesus, what a fucking mess.

‘I’ve been researching it; we think there’s a specific cult that tries to raise it every three years or so.’ Evelyn bumps her brother in the shoulder until he produces a small folded up square of newspaper. It’s old, reading from at least two hundred years ago. The death of a girl is proclaimed at the top. ‘This is one of the oldest records of this sort of thing. It came from a book I found in the back of an attic in Lancashire. We looked around some more and found that there’d been a cult operating in the area for some years that thought that if they could summon the being into a body without it dying then when it left, sorry, manifested, they would be transformed into an immortal being.’

‘How’d you figure that out?’

Evelyn smiles. ‘You’d be surprised how easy police files are to get into.’

Lydia feels a moment of warmth tinged nostalgia for her and Stiles and the near constant breaking into of secure places. It’s followed by a swoop of nausea for who and what they are now. ‘No I wouldn’t.’

‘This is everything I have.’ Evelyn whispers a words and a blank folder appears, she sticks her thumb in her mouth and then swipes the saliva down the centre on it. The folder fills with paper. She passes the folder to Lydia and inclines her head. ‘You said the rooms were upstairs?’

‘Yeah, they are. I’ll take you up.’ Evelyn tips her mostly full tea cup toward Lydia, ‘after you finish your tea.’

Jeremy begs off coming upstairs with a promise to find his sister after he finds a pub. Louisa goes with him, both of them talking tensely. Evelyn finishes her tea quietly and efficiently. She doesn’t speak again until after they’ve collected her things and Lydia has opened the door to the lobby of the old hotel. She snags one of the old door keys from the lockbox and shows Evelyn into the elevator.

‘You should be careful with her.’ Evelyn says conversationally as they exit the elevator. ‘You don’t know who you’re really talking to.’

Lydia tamps down the urge to punch her with sheer will power. It doesn’t stop her voice from showing her anger. ‘I’ve known Louisa for years, I’m as sure of her as you are of your brother.’

‘You didn’t ask what my brother and I are.’

‘It’s not a concern.’ It probably sounds arrogant, but Lydia really has rarely come across something she couldn’t handle. Lydia holds out the keys for room 623 as they exit the elevator. She gets the feeling Evelyn and Jeremy are the type to share.

Evelyn leans against the wall and hums. Lydia slips the key into the lock and presses a hand to the wall to deactivate the numerous defences put into them. ‘We’re psychics. In fact I’m an aura specialist; I can see and manipulate a person’s aura and sometimes their astral self. My brother is a, well, I guess you’d call him a bomb diffuser, except instead of bombs he diffuses people’s heads.’ Evelyn walks into the room disaffectedly. She sits on the blue and grey bed, hands casually trailing over the cover. ‘That’s quite a binding the Mścisław put on your friend. The scariest part is that he did it with care.’

Lydia stays tight lipped. Would he? Yes. Could he? Definitely. Why? To be determined. Can you trust the source of information? Not completely. But other sources including her own experience with Stiles says that it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility.

Evelyn takes her jacket off, revealing a set of long thin crystal rods and a large hook made of lapis lazuli and gold attached to the jacket by straps so they lie flat at the back of the jacket. ‘I know who you are Lydia Martin. I know who Louisa is. I know of Mr Stilinski even if I wouldn’t wish his presence on my worst enemy. Hell, his mother was worse. We both know the kind of reputation a name like Mścisława will get you.’ Vengeance and Glory. Not the best thing to name a child. ‘Even with a third of her coven dead, no, especially with a third of her coven dead, she’s vulnerable to manipulation. Not just the kind you buy with charm and a pretty face.’

‘You think someone’s in her head?’

‘Oh, no, the very first thing they teach witches after ‘how to bleed artistically’ is how to rig your brain so no one can touch it. Unfortunately that means you can rig someone’s brain.’ Evelyn shrugs. ‘Like I said, my brother is a bomb diffuser, I know how to tell. Your friends got an a-bomb in her head.’

\--

Lydia knows three hard rules about magic.

1) Don’t kill people with it. If, say, you stab someone and they bleed out it’s not your fault, but if you magically rip them to pieces you’re going to be in trouble.  
2) Trust no spell you didn’t bleed for yourself. Magic is messy and mean with a long memory.  
3) A lot of magic deals with the unseen, the old, and the elders. There are things that magic users see and deal with that those who don’t use it could not say or hear. If a witch is afraid of something you should be too.

She watches Louisa for a week. She see’s Stiles at least once every thirty six hours, usually for at least six, comes back tired every time. Her baking stays the same, as does her general behaviour, but she quiets around Scott, she’s uneasy. Lydia knows what Louisa is like in a fight, Louisa throws hurricanes like a handful of sand, she sets her own skin on fire, she’s reckless and undefeatable. Louisa said that being here was like drowning in magic she couldn’t understand. Lydia didn’t dwell on that, didn’t take it seriously, why the fuck would she, Louisa can handle anything.

She’s had some shitty friends over the years, hell, she’s been one, but letting your friend walk around with her mind ready to blow has got to take some sort of prize.

It comes to a head on a Tuesday morning. They’re not opening today on account of a few skirmishes toward the older sections of the town attributed to a group of unknowns. BayLaurel in their infinite wisdom and influence issued a warning to the supernaturally inclined to stay indoors and out of sight. Lydia had been looking forward to working out, maybe cooking later in the afternoon and freezing some stuff for quick meals. Instead she’s assaulted by a heavy stench of hazelnuts and assorted bodily fluids.

‘Louisa Maria-’

‘If you use my full name I will gut you.’ Louisa grumbles. ‘What?’

‘Hazelnuts.’

‘Are full of calcium. What?’

‘Everything is hazelnuts.’ Lydia taps her foot. ‘In the coffee, in the bread, in the tap water.’

‘Oh.’ She’s blushing and that is so fucking wrong Lydia can hardly stand it.

‘Oh. I can taste it in the air.’

‘We we’re working on a spell last night, with hazelnuts, and things may have gotten,’ she swallows, ‘heated.’

‘No, stop.’ Lydia crouches down and puts her head in her hands.

‘And we didn’t have any lubr-’

‘I regret you.’ Lydia says sincerely. ‘Very much.’

Louisa flinches. ‘If you really mean it.’

‘Of course I don’t.’

‘You sure about that?’ Louisa says accusingly. ‘What did Evelyn say to you? ‘Cause I know what Jeremy said to me and I can’t see them having divergent views.’

‘Nothing I believe.’ Lydia says. ‘What aren’t you telling me? Why didn’t you tell me about Afra? Or about Stiles?’

‘Let it go Lydia.’

‘Jeremy-’

‘He tried.’ Louisa says desperately, ‘he can’t undo it and even if he could I would have done all of it anyway.’

‘Done what?’

Louisa full body turns away from her. ‘Let it go Lydia.’

‘No,’ this will not happen to her again, she will not be left outside of it again, ‘you can’t keep secrets from me.’

‘And you’ve told me everything, right?’ Louisa says accusingly, ‘you didn’t tell me about this town or what it meant to you. Not really.’

‘You’re my friend. I want to help you.’

‘You’re immune.’ She throws down the wash cloth. ‘You can’t help.’

‘Louisa-’

‘This?’ Louisa points to her head. ‘Is not something you have the capacity to understand. It’s not what you think it is and you should let it go.’

\--

It’s barely a month after they put Jackson to rest. She’s floating on something that came out of a bottle. She tried to make Danny come with her into the forest but he looks at her sometimes like she’s a statue of glass and pearls twirling on the edge of knives. She’s not quite that fragile. She’s only leaking a little and it’s only noticeable when she’s very cold and very dark. Or in the dark and very cold. Cold and light. Light and warm. So she feels like she’s bleeding from the heart. So she wishes for a twist ending. So she wants a new pair of shoes and a new compartment of memories all coloured something that is not red or purple. If there’s any life lesson to walk away with it’s that life doesn’t care.

‘I don’t know what we were meant to be,’ she says to the great white blindness in the sky, the far away light, ‘but it was probably more than this.’

Her first love is the stars which, she knows, would have surprised everyone.

She liked to think she was a star, a gravitational force that cleaved the darkness and the emptiness and the cold. The universe revolves around her and the weight of her physics. Life did not turn out like the milky way or the cats eye or the helix. Nothing a child can see in the sky and shape with her mind. Life is not a constellation of beauty and a well polished pair of shoes. She’s still a star but the deep black is not hers to cross. She’s alone, light years between her and the next flash and swirl of light. She is very cold.

‘Well?’ she says, ‘ _well?_ ’

‘Come away,’ a voice says. Her head calls the voice Allison and then calls the voice Scott and Danny and Stiles and all of them here to take her away from the cold dark stars. Her mind tells her to take more pills. The part of her mind that is not the ashed out ruins that he crawled out of is made of stardust, is made of dying stars. It says to fight.

‘Come away with us.’ The voices all say. She becomes a light surrounded by other lights. Trapped in orbit. ‘Let us save you.’

And that’s worse than the darkness, being held in place by other people’s words, lies. In the dark at least she is her own.

She doesn’t know how to tell them that she doesn’t want them to save her.

\--

Louisa stops talking to her altogether after that. It’s not a completely unique experience, the three weeks she spent at the Sorbonne stand out vividly, but it’s the first time Lydia’s been unsure they’d talk again. The rest is the same. She see’s Derek, she see’s Scott, she see’s various customers.

It’s a bad week, all the days bleed together, her skin feels like it’s dry and papery. She hasn’t got a prescription for her anti anxiety meds so she tries to stave it all off with work. This is fairly counterproductive when the thing that’s making your skin too small with nerves is part of your nine to five and is making no effort to keep her own displeasure with you a secret. Lydia screws up the yeast for the bread and the custard for the tarts and ends up filling a glass of juice half with vodka to wash it all down.

‘You fucked up the bread orders.’ Louisa says, speaking for the first time in days. She has a satchel over a shoulder. ‘There’s some major work on the ley lines going on tonight and tomorrow. I’ll be back sometime.’

Lydia swallows the rest of her vodka down. ‘Sure. Fine. Whatever.’

Louisa glares. ‘Fine.’

‘Just go already.’ Lydia says tiredly.

The kitchen is too quiet after she’s gone. Lydia packs up and heads upstairs.

Three glasses of vodka later the folder Evelyn left beckons her with promises of easy answers. The folder is warm in her hands when she opens it up; thick coloured photographs, maps, pages of grey print occasionally blacked out, post it notes in a neat looped scrawl. Lydia had guessed that Evelyn was some sort of scholar, her speech, mannerisms and vague attitude of superiority read with the same catty viciousness Lydia is used to in academic circles. Even if she hadn’t put two and two together and come up with old blood Cambridge the fact that Evelyn wrote her personal memoirs like they’re going to be studied for centuries to come would have given it away. She picks a paragraph and begins.

_Forty four accounts of undeniably related murders stretching over two centuries from the Bordeaux sisters, 1812, to the most recent Sally Faraway, 2021, suggest that the Entity (here fore referred to as Danaus for ease of reading) requires a physical sacrifice for manifestation. While the Bordeaux sisters were obviously partially political in nature (see The Coven Transcendent and the Diable Compagnon Concise Edition; the Loup Wars) the same cannot be said of Faraway or many subsequent murders. Linda Choi, 1967, beaten to death in her home, kidneys removed, butterflies left over her eyes, has no connection to the metanatural. Andrew and Stephen Green, 1845, severely mutilated extremities, dumped down a well left to drown in a combination of spiders silk, milkweed, and various bodily fluids. Both were chemists and men of divisive politics though neither happened to be metanatural in nature. Sanjit and Louanna Malhorta, 2002, burned alive in their home using greenwax, a viscous paste that burns constantly at a very low heat, were school teachers. Their autopsy suggested that they had been feed caterpillars prior to incineration. Arthur Daven, despite being a central figure in the Crowley Argument, was cleared of murdering Kit Lowe, 1933, whose murder was later attributed to a fringe group directly linked to various murders we can lay at Danaus’ feet. Micheal Fforjd, 1995, however was found covered in..._

Evelyn goes on to list every single one of the forty four murders, their historical context, and the connections formed between all of them. It’s a shorthand for two hundred years of human depravity, selfishness, and greed. Lydia is stuck between fascination and guilt about her entire species. Around the thirty first accounts her eyes swim and she scans for a buzz word, somewhere else to jump in.

_In Lancashire we find that the land itself has changed to accommodate the brutal nature of summoning. In six places we can be sure of attempts there has been a sudden upswing of localised weather disturbances; ground that never quite dries, strange stone lumps that are warm to the touch. Inside buildings are strange coloured moss and cracks which if pressed form perfectly circular potholes. When looked at from above the ‘places of manifestation’ are put into a rough half circle shape, like the eye of a butterfly, undoubtedly purposeful in Lancashire. We also see the pattern repeated in other area’s (see entry for Russia and Rio de Janeiro). A series of strange ‘growths’ on the natural landscape that fade away naturally over time, with the exception of Lancashire where the changes seem to have permanently affected the area, are the most precise method of tracking we have currently._

_Conjecture combined with the appearance of the various monoliths would suggest that the appearance of Danaus is related to huge swells in magical activity; specifically the mass transformation of ley lines that has been prevalent since the Disillusionment. This would account for the increase in both summoning and summoning failures as the Disillusionment caused a wide rift between new wave magic users and their elders causing a gap of knowledge that will never be regained. As we can see from the works of Motherwell, Porei, and Foreaux, the chasm in magical knowledge lead to radical new practices and combined with the appearance of Alister Crowley paved the way for newer darker magic’s to find root regardless of effectiveness. The murders detailed in the previous section are possibly the most brutal currently recorded. However there is no evidence that brutality or dark magic has successfully pulled this entity into manifestation. As far as it possible to tell Danaus is benevolent and the gruesome nature of the murder done in their honour is an aspect of human cruelty._

_At the time of this writing we have arrived in Beacon Capitol (Beacon Hills to those outside the metanatural community) and have not as yet assessed the area for proof of Danaus. Considering the towns involvement in the Code Violations of 2013 and the subsequent realignment of hunter factions with the conservative element it stands to reason that if a hotspot were to occur here it would be political in motivation. This would coincide with the recent shift of several metanatural ‘heavy weights’ to the area including but not limited to the Fates, Mortimer Brisbois (see Short Orders: History of the Sorbonne Underground), Harper Black ( see Women of the Vatican), Abena Achieing ( see Oral Histories of the middle Africa), Haikundoyuma, Wesley Parker, Louisa Martell (see The Coven Transcendent for affiliates and known conquests) and Lydia Martin (see The Short History of War: The Argents and the Hales, chapters 12 – 17, specifically the chapters pertaining to the desecration of Peter Hale). Coincidentally Ms. Martin is the only known survivor of a Danaus summoning though it remains to be seen if she is aware of this. If she is not it would be in best interest to inform her quietly and subtly as the political climate of Beacon Capitol is volatile at best._

Subtly.

Yeah, okay.

_There are two text accounts of Danaus as an entity. One found underneath the floor of an old church in Lancashire and one from the Bordeaux Library. Both are in their natural language at the back of this volume for easy perusal. Neither have any suggestions on how to ‘kill’ Danaus. The Bordeaux manuscripts do speak of ‘disenchantment through qu’estoit’ which the Lancashire text backs up but neither of which are completely clear on the meaning. They also mention an impasse at which the Danaus is corporeal, depowered, and can be reasoned with. Presumably this is the point at which the recipient would ask for their immortality._

_Any scholar with knowledge of the last five hundred years of metanatural history can see how ripe the conditions are for-_

Lydia closes the book. She is well aware.

The rest of the folder is filled with maps and photos. The photos are all greyscale panoramas, wide fields of dense white stones, Evelyn’s writing layered on top in red script. Lydia puts down the photos and unfolds the maps, taking care to lay them flat, figures out the scale, and sets about trying to put her knowledge to use.

The giant looping circles that are the ley lines surrounding Beacon Hills are formed deliberately. There’s a huge indent right in the middle and three long spiralled arms spreading out to touch the very edges of Hale territory. That’s not surprising considering that the Hale family has held it for a handful of centuries already. When the mass reformation of magic happened they probably seized the opportunity to make sure no one could ever take the land off them. Not as long as some of their blood remains on it. She would make several large bets that Derek is only partially aware of this.

Further towards Beacon Hills proper the ley lines shift into the natural connections formed by people, thicker where it’s busiest, thinner towards the residences, thinning completely in a few spots. Huge trauma’s most likely; places that are no longer hospitable to growth or change. Around the Hale house is a series of lines that at first glance are fortified, yes, but not particularly interesting otherwise. They spider out into where she knows the centre mass of the house is and form neat tessellated stars. Lydia is familiar with the pattern because it’s also embedded into the walls of her own home and can only be done if the witch who does them ties themselves to the fate of the building. It’s deep magic, never done lightly, and only preformed by a handful of people on the planet. You only do it on family dwellings or safe houses because it forms a giant impenetrable panic room that if activated may kill the witch that created it.

‘Motherfucker.’ Lydia hisses. There’s only one person who would know how to do that in the country, only two in the world now, and not even Stiles fucking Stilinski could bend Ekundayo.

She’s too drunk to drive by a long shot but her solid pick up gets her there. The wolves had to have heard her from miles off, she wasn’t being quiet, and if she’d thought about it she’d know this was a bad idea. She still finds herself stumbling halfway to the hale house screaming Stiles name in between threatening breaths. She’s a bare two metres from the front door when Isaac comes loping out, hands placating.

She gets a fist full of Isaac’s shirt in her hands. ‘Stiles! Where is he?’

Isaac shrugs and leans back. The height difference makes her grip difficult to hold on to. ‘Lydia, nice to see you, why would Stiles be here?’

‘You have tessellated star shaped wards; they make very distinctive ground patterns. The only reason you make a tessellated pattern as a grounding grid is if your main source of power is permanently stationed on the grid because it’s basically a giant panic room. I don’t give two shits why Stiles thinks he needs the protection he does not need it at the potential cost of someone else’s life.’

Isaac cocks his head. Either he’s an amazing actor or he has no idea what she’s talking about. ‘We haven’t done anything.’

‘Should I just believe you?’

‘You can believe me.’ Derek says, easily separating her from Isaac. ‘Please don’t hurt Isaac.’

‘What if I did?’

‘I’d consider you hostile.’ Derek obviously doesn’t feel particularly good about saying it.

Lydia steps back and nearly falls to her knees with the urge to laugh. Derek is such an idiot. ‘Do you know what he is?’

‘A witch.’

‘A monster.’

He shrugs. ‘Same thing most times.’

‘You’re unbelievably stupid. Mścisław is a title not a name. It’s given to the first born child of a particular kind of mother. They’re powerful amoral weapons designed to hunt down their targets and demolish them, their family, whatever they have to. Trained like machines. Like drones. They’re meant to seek out targets and kill them as horrifically as possible. That is what is Stiles is.’

His father was the sheriff, is what she expects to hear. You can’t know that and he would never and any other untrue platitude that she has a clean precise argument for. She’s promised Allison a dozen times she wouldn’t tell Derek anything about why there’s an unexplainable void of nothingness underneath an old airplane hanger in Texas and air that will never smell clean again, will always carry the unmistakable stench of Allison and Stiles. She’s promised to never talk about why Stiles wouldn’t let her kill Peter or why Stiles mother ended up in a small town in bug fuck nowhere or why Allison’s family has hunted Derek’s for so long. She’s promised to never tell him why 2013 happened in the first place or why they’re about to go to war. Derek can’t know. Can’t ever know.

Derek sneers. ‘You think I don’t know that?’ Oh, oh, that obstinate fucker, he hasn’t got the first clue.

Lydia bites her tongue so hard she makes a tiny split in it. Derek doesn’t know because Derek actually knows shit fucking all about what’s going on outside Beacon Hills. Derek doesn’t know about Stiles because if he did he’d know about Allison and he’d know why Allison stopped calling anyone in this town and why she begged Lydia too as well. If he had the first clue what they’ve done for him-

He doesn’t, though, and he shouldn’t, not yet.

She swallows her blood and spit. ‘You haven’t been beyond the Beacon Hills limits in seven years.’ Derek begins to answer, Lydia holds up one finger. ‘It’s not a question. If you knew how terrified people are of what Stiles is you’d burn down this house with him in it.’ You’d find Allison and burn hers too.

‘Thank you for your condescension.’

Lydia throws her arm out smacking Derek with her palm. He reaches up and holds it, squeezing along the length of her fingers threateningly. ‘What is your problem with me?’

Derek grips her hand tighter. ‘You threw it back at us.’

‘What?’

‘We would have done anything to help you.’

‘This is about your pride?’ She screams. ‘I just wanted you to let me go.’

‘Yeah, that went well.’

‘I grew up.’

He snorts.

‘I did,’ Lydia manages to wrench her hand away stumbling and falling over in the process, ‘you don’t know what I’ve done.’

‘That’s half the fucking problem.’

‘What? I ruined your illusions of family time? I got in the way of your precious pack? Things didn’t turn out the way you wanted, well, congratulations that’s what happens, things don’t-’

‘I’m sorry a group of people who loved you was such a horrible proposition.’ He says snidely.

‘That’s not fair.’ She says instead of the that’s not true lingering in the air.

‘You mentioned that.’ He helps her off the ground, turns her and all but stuffs her back in the car. ‘You ran, remember? You don’t deserve our kindness and you don’t seem to think you need it. We’re offering anyway.’

‘Why?’

Derek’s eyes are red, red, red, and so very angry when they meet hers. ‘Well, Lydia, if you can’t see that yet I’m not sure why I’m bothering with you.’

\--

The car stutters to a stop in one of the shadier parts of town.

‘Don’t you dare,’ Lydia climbs out of the car, heel snapping on the pavement. She pops the hood just to be greeted by a billow of fumes and the smell of petrol. She flips open her phone just to hear it beep three times and die. ‘This is just what I needed. Thank you.’

There’s an old pay phone rusted out of general service by smart phones and the internet now only used for calls you can’t make in the circle of trusted friends, family, and internet service providers. On a scale of one to ten, Allison Argent is at a fifteen on the dangerous liaisons scale. Allison should know, though, she has to know that Derek is still so painfully unaware and trusting. That he still doesn’t really understand the pit of vipers he lives in. That Lydia doesn’t really either. The adrenaline has burned off most of the alcohol but she’s still not clear headed enough to think about what she just did or the repercussions of the call she’s about to make.

She dials and takes a mantra between her lips. Nous protéger d'en haut.

‘Who is this?’ A man’s voice says. Lydia can hear a little girl in the background, laughing and growling, alternating between French and English. ‘Why the fuck don’t you ever talk, who are you?’

‘I’m looking for Alli-’

‘No, no you’re not, please-’ the man begs, the phone is plucked out of his hand a second later, a beat of dead air, then, ‘if you’re looking for Allison I’m afraid you’ll have to try a newer number, she is no longer associated with this one.’

‘Can I have it forwarded?’

The voice hums. ‘Five words. Ten seconds.’

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuckkity fuck. ‘What beasts snap in moonlight.’

Lydia hears the little girl laugh again, voice growling on the end of her words, before the dial tone comes through.

And as if the day needed to get worse that was also the last of her change.

\--

The walk home is unkind to her ankles.

When she opens the door she finds Louisa’s wards disabled and Scott cross legged on the counter calmly working his way through a crossword.

‘Got a call from Derek.’

‘You’re going to try and make me talk about it.’

‘Yep.’

‘No.’

Scott sighs and uncrosses his legs.

‘Get off my counter.’

‘No.’ He says with the same cutting inflection.

‘Please.’ She says, just the once. Girls like her shouldn’t have to. She makes to cross to the kitchen, slipping into the heat Scott’s putting off.

‘If anyone was going to understand it would be me.’ He says, like it’s simple. Like people can just talk about it.

‘I will not be bullied into dealing with-’ Scott neatly lifts an arm, halts her and turns and twists until she’s boxed against the counter top unable to avoid him. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Making sure you can’t just disconnect from this conversation like you have every single other time anyone’s tried to have it with you.’

‘You don’t get to do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘I get to decide when and how I deal with this.’

‘Even if not dealing with it is killing you.’ Scott eases back a little just enough that she could get out. ‘I can see how hard this is for you. It hurts you and I don’t really understand why you won’t let me help you.’

‘I’m coping.’

‘There are other ways to cope.’

Redirect. ‘I’m sorry is this conversation even still about me? Whatever issues you have with Peter or Allison are not mine.’

She slips by him and walks into the mess and heat of the kitchen. The ovens are on. Louisa must have come back while she was gone and fixed the tarts she fucked up. All the ingredients are all over the table and the pastry is half made. It burns Lydia a little that Louisa wants to avoid her this badly.

‘Stop.’ Scott grabs her by the arm and turns her a lot more kindly then Derek did. ‘There are a lot of things I’ll let you say to me but that’s not one of them.’

‘Let me,’ she says with an incredulous snarl, ‘let me?’

‘I’m not as nice as I used to be.’ His hands run over his face, his hair, ‘I don’t need three cups of coffee a day.’

There is a countdown here. There are a whole universe of words she’ll never be able to take back if he doesn’t shut the fuck up right now. His lips are close and he smiled at her and she wants it like she wants to fucking breathe and there is a universe and she is a star in the dark on her own. It’s claustrophobic. It’s euphoric. It’s closer than she’s been to anyone since she waited by the pyre with her masks dripping off. She’s not ready. Never will be, maybe. She doesn’t want to hear him say it. Her bakery is full of sweets and safety and love. So what if the world she can’t control scares her. She can control this.

She throws a raspberry tart at him.

His eyes widen when it hits home bouncing off his shoulder.

‘Ha,’ she jumps right into his space and waves a hand, she wins.

Scott smiles. ‘Okay then.’ He says, then he reaches over, picks up a half empty dish of maple syrup and pours it over her head. Lydia blinks, stupefied, as it drips down her forehead, over her lips, crosses her collarbones. Scott’s smile widens. ‘Looks good.’

‘This is tailored.’ Syrup drips down her neck and onto the sweetheart neckline of her dress. She tries to rub it off but that just results in sticky fingers.

‘I think it looks better that way.’

‘I don’t respond well to challenges.’

‘Great,’ he says, crumpling up a friand in his hands and throwing it in the general direction of her chest. She’ll be finding crumbs in her bra forever.

She hears herself laugh, high, breathless, not like she usually sounds. She takes stock of her immediate inventory. There are a mix of berries on the counter, a range of tarts. The beginnings of ossobuco, eggplants leeching in a huge bowl of salt water. Her teacup, his coffee. Her Sudoku and his crossword.

Lydia sucks in a harsh breathe and chooses a tart, strawberry and oranges and thick whipped brandy cream. It’s a tiny weight in her hand, smaller still as she reaches up and crushes it to the curve of Scott’s smile. He laughs and picks up two, lavender and lemon, and presses it to her cheeks. She can feel the hard press of his fingers through the mess. He swipes his thumbs down over her lips and she opens her mouth to let him press in over the sharp edges of her teeth, dragging the taste in.

‘I’ll break you,’ she says through half a mouthful of lemons and vanilla and lavender.

‘Oh, I’m sure you’ll break my heart.’ He says with a piece of orange falling off his chin. ‘But it won’t break me.’

What a thing to say. How can caring not split you open and leave you alone in a blooded field. Leave you alone in the dirt. Leave you alone when all the wolves are tearing you apart from the inside out. It has to hurt, doesn’t it? You have to be scared. It shouldn’t be safe. Half a moment has her thinking about the thick, heavy smell of sweets in the air and the crumbling pastry plastered along Scott’s shirt and shoes. Is it safe? What is safe? But her head doesn’t want her to think about it. The blackout noise of trauma and a decade of not looking at any of it too closely hushes her up and ties her back into the here and now.

She takes his hand and listens to the squelch of the mess between their fingers and it’s not safe but it could be something and maybe she should try.

\--

Lydia cleans up, the sweet and sour taste of Scott still on her lips, and goes downstairs again for tea. Louisa is sitting on the floor aimlessly drawing on a notepad.

‘Have you seen it?’ Louisa asks.

Lydia shakes her head, ‘what?’

Louisa frowns. ‘It’s on the doorstep.’

Lydia walks to the door. Sitting on their stoop is a children’s plush toy covered in silver fur. It has a note around its neck that reads; what only girls raised in sunlight should fear.

‘Allison?’ Louisa asks.

Lydia nods. ‘She’s coming home.’

\--

Scott has a tendency to interrupt her workflow by kissing her at inopportune moments. Right now his hand is creeping under her shirt and his mouth is pressed tightly against the side of her neck. This would be lovely and romantic if she wasn’t trying to make sure custard doesn’t curdle.

‘What are you cooking?’ he asks, hand scratching below her bellybutton. ‘Can I eat it?’

‘You could probably eat raw flesh and be perfectly fine.’ Lydia pulls

‘Did you know answering the question would take just as much time and energy as being obstinate?’

Lydia snorts. ‘But at what cost?’

Scott laughs, the sound warm and affectionate against her, she feels something inside her seize up with either fear or affection. Scott brings that out in her. She shakes it off and continues slicing.

Scott taps her stomach thoughtfully. ‘I’m going to be around less for awhile.’

‘I’m a full grown adult McCall I managed just fine before you.’

‘Yeah,’ he says displeased. ‘Call me if you need to.’

After he’s gone Lydia realises she should have asked if he was okay.

Lydia rolls out her pastry, dipping her fingers into a bowl of cool water before she works the edges against the pan. In the corner of her she can see a figure, her dark hair swaying just out of sync with the shadows.

‘Are you really hiding in the shadows? Really?’

‘That looks like it’s going well.’ Evelyn says.

‘That is really none of your business.’

‘Don’t kid yourself Lydia,’ Evelyn comes forward to lean against the counter, ‘Scott McCall is everybody’s business. Best player on the team and all that.’

Lydia sighs. ‘What’s going on?’

Evelyn taps her finger against the obituaries of the day’s newspaper, ‘Harold and Courtney Gainsborough.’

Lydia carefully rotates the filling as she pours it into the pie. ‘Who are?’

‘From an old house in Lancashire that had a very useful attic and up until an unfortunate and deadly animal attack in Beacon Hills staying with a family friend.’ The rage in Evelyn’s voice is barely contained. ‘You know any family friends who like to summon gods?’

‘A few.’ Fucking hell Stiles, ‘I can get a few answers.’

‘I hope so.’

Evelyn leaves gracefully floating on her obvious rage. The thing is Lydia doesn’t actually know that Stiles is the root cause here. It’s more than likely but it’s not certain. Once again her very small circle of contacts is a hindrance. There’s no point calling Scott or Derek or anyone who stayed in town after graduation. What trump cards does she have?

Allison is out for a never ending list of reasons, there’s a short list of people who think well enough of her to get her some answers but using those cards now would weaken her hand too much. What does she have?

‘Gods,’ she sighs and slides the pie into cook.

\--

The phone number the mechanic gave her leads her to a small bath house called Feu smack bang in the middle of the new town centre.

It is also, conveniently, situated across from the shiny BayLaurel building.

BayLaurel is an architectural masterpiece; it’s monolithic in it’s aggressively understated elegance and she can almost hear the expensive coffee machines in the break rooms. It looks the way Lydia feels in her one floor length black dress. It looks like it’s hiding secrets. Although it’s very likely Lydia will have to visit BayLaurel sometime soon she is really hoping to stave it off.

In contrast the half shadowed entrance to Feu beckons ominously. There’s no one in the reception area when Lydia steps in, just a stacked up bunch of papers on an messy desk right in front of the door and boxes overflowing with knitting supplies. To either side of the desk are two doors both pitch dark, no light or sound escaping. The door on the left begins to hum and brighten, the light emerging as if from very far away. The light comes closer and Lydia see’s that it is an orb floating by itself in the dark.

‘Oh, you are interesting.’ The light says. ‘Occasionally zie gets fascinated with nothing at all. Very boring when zie brings it home. Follow me.’

The light begins to recede and after a moment’s hesitation Lydia follows it. A few metres into the darkness and Lydia can no longer see the reception area. The darkness is absolute and unending. The light sings a song. _Ohh death stalks this town, it’s gonna get you down, get you, get you, get you._

‘Are we nearly there?’ Lydia asks.

‘Of course we are, we always are.’ The light says, ‘welcome to the bathhouse.’

The light expands in rapid jolts around them exposing a high ceilinged room designed like an amphitheatre. Waves and waves of perfumed steam roll out of large vents situated at the highest point of the room. Lydia is standing on the stage surrounded on all sides by nude or semi-nude people, all of whom are eating food that floats up to them on lights. They’re arranged in clusters, crude pictures and sigils streaked across their bodies in paint and blood. Three men at the back with a horse’s head, a goats skin, and a the horns of a ram each. Two women picking their way through a fruit platter. A group of women whose skin drips with tattooed birds takes up near to half the space. They’re all set apart in groups of three. Every so often a bird flies off their skin and onto the skin of another group. The women, Lydia knows, work at the knitting superstore in town. The Mechanic is sitting on the closest step to her; three woman seated behind him all their hair shining pure white.

‘Ms Martin.’ The Mechanic says. ‘Would you like to know your fate?’

Yes. Of course.

Lydia frowns. ‘No. I suppose not.’

‘You’re not happy with that answer.’ A woman with hair that falls in all the colours of autumn and spring says. Another woman sitting next to her, her dark hair pulled back starkly against high cheekbones pulls apart a pomegranate dropping the seeds into a floating glass of milky liquid.

Lydia nods. ‘If I had an actual choice it’s not the one I’d make.’

‘But you don’t,’ the woman with the pomegranate says, ‘you haven’t for a very long time. That will continue until it doesn’t.’

‘And if it doesn’t?’

‘Then it doesn’t. It ends. You arrive transformed.’ The Mechanic says. Zie picks up one of the shiny haired girls’ hands and whispers something.

Lydia’s performing with no script, no directions, and no exit line. She can’t look around the room, not properly, and all her answers are literally life and death. The next thing she says has to be impressive without shaking up the ire gods so often feel at being bested.

Lydia takes a steadying breath. ‘What do you lose by telling me this?’

There’s a beat of silence, three, then;

‘You are brilliant.’

She doesn’t preen; preening in front of gods gets you turned into a spider. Lydia reaches down to take off her shoes. ‘May I?’ The Mechanic nods with a wry smile. The steam is heavy and sticky against her skin. She takes off her jacket next. ‘You won’t tell me some things because you can’t, or because you think it’s safer for you if I don’t know. I don’t think it’s about my safety because why would it be? It’s safer for me to ask around the questions I want answered and build a network from which I can make informed conjecture. You’re less likely to be offended by that.’

‘We may have grown less fickle with time.’ The woman with the pomegranate says.

‘Why take that chance?’ Lydia reaches up to take her shirt off, better to even the playing field, ‘I am brilliant, I am smarter than any other human you’ve ever met-’ she pulls off her pants, leaving her just as naked as them, ‘because I’m smart enough to want fuck all to do with any of this. But as you said I don’t have a choice. So if I have one question to ask straight out, it’s why me, why here, why now?’

‘That’s three.’ A man with a horse masks says.

‘One question mark.’

‘Three answers.’ The woman with spring and autumn in her hair replies. ‘You’re important, one day you’ll end up here again on a much more even playing field and it’s in our best interests to get a good look while you’re still so weak. We promised our partners at BayLaurel to keep you busy for an afternoon.’ Lydia opens her mouth and the other woman raises her hand. ‘Don’t ask why, we’d have to kill you. And what other time would things happen then now?’

The air is getting cooler around her and the steam is clearing, it’s time to leave now. ‘Do I get to leave?’

‘Do you know how?’ The Mechanic raises a goblet, ‘we might decide to keep you.’

Lydia doesn’t bother to stop her shudder. ‘With my legs, I imagine.’

‘You should imagine, good trait.’ The woman holding the pomegranate says, pausing to feed the seeds to her companion. ‘Food?’

‘Not hungry.’

‘Lie.’

Lydia bites her lip. ‘One more question.’

‘You are pushing.’ The woman with the pomegranate says ‘I’ll answer if you agree to have dinner with us.’

‘Fine.’ Lydia agrees desperately avoiding wondering what Hades wants with her.

‘Why were the Gainsborough’s killed?’

‘Power.’ The Mechanic says. ‘They were the last of a very long line of powerful witches with knowledge that would make them almost undefeatable. Now that knowledge belongs to someone else.’

Lydia nods and begins to pull her clothes back on.

‘Would you like to dine with us?’ Persephone asks, suddenly close, tugging Lydia’s hair out of her bra, and smoothing her pants down. Her hands glide down Lydia’s face.

‘I’m immune,’ Lydia says, ‘the food of the gods would be dirt to me.’

‘Even what you make yourself?’

‘I’d still be immune.’

Persephone makes a sign on her forehead. ‘We will find you.’ She promises.

In the next instant the amphitheatre is gone and the light is slowly flickering back into existence.

‘So interesting.’ The light sighs, ‘goodbye.’

When Lydia leaves the bathhouse it’s just past nightfall, her still wet skin cooling too quickly in the air. There is a dark figure standing across the road inside the BayLaurel building. It waves at her. She stares at it dumbstruck for a few minutes. The figure shakes it’s head sadly, produces an umbrella and turns into the evening light. Even from across the street she can hear it humming under it’s breath. Ohh, death walks this town, god will stike you down, so run little girl, run, run, run, deaths gonna get you, ohhhh, how death’s gonna get you down.

The song hangs in the air long after the figure is gone.

\--

It should get easier, really, they’ve been in town a while, the client base is pretty solid, and they’ve got opening and closing down to a science.

It doesn’t get easier.

She’s shaky and unwell and it hurts sometimes just to breathe. Blah blah blah long term stress, blah blah blah, depression, blah blah blah, take the pills. The pills aren’t helping anymore, nothing is. The gods in this town think she’s going to be a player, everyone does. On one hand she appreciates the association with power on the other hand that means she’s not leaving this town.

She thinks about staying here with all her ghosts and her history and him hanging over her head and she gets fidgety, tense, looks for shadows at midday and strange lights in the night. She’s tipping too far to the bad side again and with the murders still happening and whatever political nightmare they’re sitting on the edge of creeping ever forward she can’t escape. Not even for a few minutes.

Somehow, in the middle of this, she and Derek reach an unspoken truce. Derek doesn’t needle her the way he did before and Lydia stops baiting him. When they aren’t letting the weight of politics dictate their conversations he’s pleasant enough company. Their still regular visits turn into something of a respite. For an hour every week all she has to do is deal with Derek.

Derek looks at her for a few long moments. He gets up and leaves. His stuff is still here so she supposes it isn’t over yet. Five minutes later he comes back holding a battered wooden box in his hands.

‘Chess?’ Derek asks brandishing the old chess kit from the science section.

‘You play?’ Lydia frowns, the unpleasant nudge she associates with information gleamed from Peter floating across her brain. ‘Wait, I know you do, Peter taught you.’

‘Pretty good at it when I can concentrate.’ Derek shrugs out of his coat and pulls up the sleeves of his deep green shirt.

She nods. ‘Your feelings always got the better of you.’

He’s silent, setting up the pieces. He’s black and she’s white. There is a half taken off butterfly sticker over the head of the white queen. Derek smirks when she holds it up. ‘Common ground.’

‘Neutral ground.’ Lydia says, ‘I’m going to make you regret this, Hale.’

‘Bring your worst, Martin.’

\--

One of Beacon Hills newest additions is a small park situated around a man made pond. There are tables, a few barbeques, and a children’s play area. Lydia doesn’t know what the pond is actually for but it’s probably not something you want children around. It’s past midday and Lydia, as always, is wearing the wrong damn shoes for this.

‘So?’

‘Hello?’ Allison says, her hair is cropped very close to her head, it makes her face look older than it is, ‘we could start with that.’

‘We could.’

Allison doesn’t take it personally. ‘They’re not aligned with any hunter faction, even the ones I’m not meant to know about. The first mention in any of the records we have is in 1897 at a massacre in Lancashire, England, mostly because a body full of butterflies was not the standard for the area. Next time we see it, it’s across the ocean in New Orleans. I can’t tell you the details but it was gruesome.’

For once Lydia has all the cards. She trusts Allison more than trusts almost anyone but half a war is preparation and half a war is secrecy.

‘What happened after I left?’

‘I wrote you letters.’ Allison says,

‘I couldn’t, some of them, the ones about-’ Lydia rubs her eyes and sighs, the problem with Allison is that she never really left. Lydia cut her ties and didn’t so much as glance at her history until she had to. Allison dragged it around like a dead horse, beat it until it turned into some sort of mantra. The Argents will murder the Hales except for in the town of Beacon Hills where history is stagnant and constantly rewritten. Lydia doesn’t want her history and she sure as fuck doesn’t want her life written into the tragedy that Allison is weaving, ‘the ones that were about-’

‘Stop.’ Allison says kindly. So kind for a woman who will kill so many people. ‘You read some of them?’

‘I know more about Derek Hale’s naked body than I ever wished to.’ And the passages and the bounties and the woman you let yourself be shaped into, the weapon you used that knowledge to forge yourself into. I know you and this war like the back of my hand and I don’t want it.

Allison smirks against the tip of her pen. ‘The rest was terrible and I’m glad you never had to see it.’ She taps the pen against her lips. ‘I never did understand the hairless thing though.’

‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here.’ Lydia lies.

Allison smiles and flips a page on her report. ‘Three more at random intervals over the next 50 years though you said your source that we’re missing more than a few.’

More lies and she’d be sorry, really, if she was any other woman. ‘Once every 7 to 9 years. He thinks it might be as common as 3.’

‘How did we miss that?’

‘My side has known about it for awhile.’ It’s probably a mistake to call the half formed contacts and millennia long mistrust she’s got going on around here a side but it’s something Allison of all people would forgive her. Allison’s smile grows brittle. ‘What?’

‘Your side.’ Allison shrugs, hair falling off her shoulder. She’s going gray, thin streaks at the temple winding underneath the darker curls. ‘I thought we might end up on the same page again at some point.’

‘I’m not human. Not by your standards anyway. I haven’t been for a very long time. I just accepted it quicker, I think.’

‘I don’t think I could have done it.’

‘You’re a soldier. You wouldn’t have had to.’

‘Spy, assassin, daughter, mother, leader. I was never a good soldier.’

‘You were a crappy friend sometimes too.’

Allison laughs and it’s a testament to how far they’ve both come as people that the resentment is only half hearted. ‘God, I know. It felt like I was out of control. No,’ she shakes her head, ‘that’s not fair. I knew what I was doing but it never felt like it was really my choice. It was always like there was something else pushing me to do it. That doesn’t absolve me of responsibility, not even close, but I wish I could tell people that and not sound crazy.’

‘I know,’ Lydia says, ‘we all know, in retrospect.’

\--

Allison gets pregnant at the tail end of nineteen when the worst of everything begins to happen. Allison goes into labour in the back of a van with the unseelie court running just a hairs breadth behind them.

There’s a theme here.

‘Turn right.’ Allison hisses into her ear, loading another round into her gun around the heavy swell of her stomach. Below her knees the van floor is wet; even with Allison going through every exercise she knows her baby is going to come sooner than is technically safe. Lydia drives even faster, wheels scraping the road, the staccato of gunfire tensing up her shoulders. The open doors of the van clang open and shut, Allison’s bullets roaring through. The things chasing them, half deer, half teeth; all fae, make unnerving noises in time with their hooves. Lydia turns right and then left.

‘Who knew faeries were so territorial.’ Allison says. There’s a pop and a scream, she must have hit something critical.

Everyone,’ Lydia takes a hand off the steering wheel and grabs for Allison’s. Slides her thumb to the wrist. Allison’s pulse is too erratic. ‘Every fucking body knows that.’

‘Come on. We’re Allison Argent and Lydia Martin. There isn’t a crisis invented we can’t handle.’ She knows Allison well enough to hear the smile.

‘Oh, sure. Going into labour in the middle of a fire fight, blowing up a few hundred tonnes of rice. That’s a Tuesday.’

‘It was smart putting the meeting next to a rice factory.’ Allison fires three shots. Reloads. Fires again. Lydia can count the groans and screams of critical hits.

‘That was my idea.’

‘Yeah, it was smart.’ Allison puts down her gun. ‘That’s the last of ‘em.’

‘You okay?’ Lydia asks.

‘Fuck.’ Allison’s hair is dripping with sweat; her hands shaking as she gets onto her knees. She pushes her pants and underwear off completely. Lydia undoes her seatbelt runs around the van and in through the back, shoving blankets between Allison’s knees. ‘This is so much worse than torture training.’

Lydia’s only read a handful of books on midwifery, never thinking she’d have to do this. ‘It’s too late for a hospital.’

‘I brought equipment.’ Allison says pointing to a black box pressed against the side of the van.

Lydia rolls her eyes. ‘Of course you did.’

Lydia doesn’t remember delivering Allison’s baby but she does remember Allison screaming, the too close wails of monsters, and the first ear splitting shriek of the baby’s lungs. Allison snatches her from Lydia’s hands while she deals with the afterbirth. Lydia’s clothes are soaked in blood, piss, and other unsanitary things but all either of them can do is look at the dark haired baby rocking slowly in Allison’s arms.

‘Can’t name her Laura. Sure as fuck can’t name her Kate. Or Victoria.’ Allison draws a love heart on the part of the babies head that isn’t matted down by hair or viscera. ‘His mother’s name was Talia, it means ‘lamb’. It’d be a pretty unfunny joke.’

‘Name her for what you want,’

Allison quirks an eyebrow. ‘All I want right now is a shower and somewhere safe to rest. ‘

‘Name her that then, see where it gets you.’ Lydia rolls her eyes. ‘You’re gonna give her the chance we never got. No wars, no spies. Name her for that.’

Allison hums, considering. ‘I knew a woman in Cairo, one of the best snipers in the world. Compelling woman. I guess she wasn’t beautiful but she moved like you should always be looking at her. She taught me to shoot while four months pregnant. She was crazy about her kid. When I found out-’ Allison sighs and reaches a hand for Lydia. She takes it, ignoring the squish between her fingers. ‘Thinking about her helped me decide. I thought ‘that’s what I want; to have something I was just excited about’. Maybe if I saw my child as something to be thrilled by I would feel worse about destroying it. Maybe she wouldn’t have to be like Kate or my father or-’ The baby turns it’s head a little toward Allison, clenches it’s tiny fist. ‘She died. Shot through the head and the heart. They couldn’t save the baby. She was going to call it Cerise. It means cherry. Not ‘ruler of the people’ or ‘noble purpose’ or ‘god given’. ‘Don’t put a destiny in a name, Argent’ she said, and I won’t.’

‘Cerise Argent?’

‘Cerise Parker. My last attaché died in combat but I kept the legal documents. The family name is on me and me alone.’

‘Be a little hard to hide that.’

‘I won’t. I can’t,’ the wail of cars draws closer. They’ll have to move soon. ‘but it will never be her mantle. Her choice maybe and I’d be lying if I said that was what I wanted, but if it is then I won’t make her go against it. I just want her to choose. We never chose.’

‘Cerise.’ Lydia reaches out and touches the arch of Cerise’ foot. ‘Choice.’

\--

Allison and Louisa have a relationship founded on a mutual love of Lydia, crude humour, and battle scars. Allison’s arrival means that Louisa and Lydia have to move on from their fight. It’s still brittle and awkward but it’s workable. Allison obviously notes the tension even if she doesn’t do anything to bring it up.

‘Okay, but I found one, like, I swirled my finger around the head right and then, squirt!’

Allison giggles, ‘I put a guy in one of those shock collars for thirty seconds, so I could get the van ready and when I came back he has his dick out and-’

Louisa leans forward and covers Allison’s mouth with two fingers. ‘Oslo, my 19th birthday with these two, actually, I didn’t know how they identified, but still babe, twins with matching hot spots. I wished I had four hands!’

Allison grins. ‘I know a guy.’

Louisa considers it heavily for a moment. ‘It would make shopping more difficult.’

‘You go shopping with Lydia, what is more difficult?’

They toast each other. Lydia does another shot. ‘The only reason either of you know how to shop is because of me.’

‘Doesn’t make it less nightmare inducing.’ Louisa drawls. ‘I have to go anyway.’

‘Hot date.’

‘We’re relining the foundation wards. Make some lava.’

Allison winces. ‘Ew.’

‘I’m fire based, he’s earth based. We make lava. Head out of gutter, Argent.’

‘You don’t actually want that.’

‘Not even a little bit,’ Louisa twists her fingers, dislocates her thumb, and disappears out of the room leaving a few rolls of heat behind and her voice floating, ‘bye girls.’

‘What now?’

‘High school gossip? Braid each others hair?’ Lydia wiggles her eyebrows.

Allison grins. ‘Joy riding?’

‘Delinquent.’ Lydia says haughtily. She pulls on a jacket anyway.

They take Allison’s car fully equipped for off road travel. They take an old abandoned track that ten years ago saw a lot of supernatural action. The road is rougher than she remembers. She can feel the years running under the wheels.

After a long stretch of comfortable silence Allison turns to her. ‘Do you regret moving back?’

‘I don’t think so.’ It feels true enough when she says it. ‘I don’t regret leaving though.’

‘Yeah.’ Allison looks away, the bright moon overhead shining on her face. ‘So Cerise wants to know when you’re going to come back and teach her Latin. She hates not being able to read the bestiaries.’

‘She still got that one tuft of her that just sticks up?’

Allison makes a haggard noise in the back of her throat. ‘It’s impossible. She’s at this point that’s apparently common with werewolf kids where she won’t bathe for days and screams the whole house down when you so much as glance at water.’

‘Territory thing?’

‘Five year old thing.’

Lydia smiles. ‘Five year old werewolf thing?’

‘I blame the Hale side. Everyone knows Argents follow orders.’ Allison says bitterly. She pulls the car over and leans her head against the wheel. ‘Fuck. We couldn’t even have a car ride without it coming up.’

‘Speaking of unavoidable.’ Lydia sighs, unbuckling her seatbelt. ‘Did you come because I called or because an assassin got your kid?’

‘Remember when we were just friends?’ Lydia shakes her head, of course she doesn’t. Allison rolls her shoulders. ‘Neither, Javier, the man you talked to, is the biggest hardass I’ve ever met but he’d slit his own throat before he’d let anything happen to Cerise. It’s other people he hates, not her.’

‘You ever think about moving back?’

Allison looks at her blankly. Then she undoes her seatbelt and climbs out of the car. Lydia sighs and follows her stepping out and coming to stand shoulder to shoulder with Allison in the wide dark night. Allison looks anywhere but at her obviously running through answers looking for one both true and safe. The night becomes sad and still between them.

‘Yes and then also no.’ Allison begins walking, angling her shoulder and leading through the trees. Lydia follows a step behind keeping careful to walk where Allison did. ‘This is closest place I ever came to having a home but at the same time I really resent being tied down. Guess it was the ‘lack of stability’ as a kid.’

‘Or spearheading a revolution.’ Allison turns to glare at her, Lydia rolls her eyes. ‘I thought we’d stopped avoiding the elephant in the room.’

‘We could talk about the other giant werewolf elephants.’

Dear god no. ‘So how’s Cerise doing in math?’

Allison laughs which was all Lydia wanted anyway.

‘Kicking ass and taking names.’ Allison tenses. ‘Shh.’

Lydia frowns and stops. Allison is scanning the area with her eyes, hand slipping to the knife strapped to her thigh. ‘What is it?’

Allison shakes her head and taps just under her ear. ‘Listen.’

Lydia does. After a moment she hears it, a soft wet noise from a fair way in front of them.

_Stut stut stut_

Allison flicks her chin up. ‘Well?’

Lydia sighs, ‘why not?’

Allison’s face settles into a well worn set of lines. Allison the warrior instead of Allison the friend or Allison the mother. Lydia stays behind her as they go forward, the crunch of dirt underfoot their only companion. They come into a large obviously man made clearing, unusually tall rocks fencing the sides and trees twisted away from the centre. The entire clearing stinks of magic. Sticking out of the ground is a huge monolith of crystal and dirt covered stone, cracked and weeping scalloped palettes of colours from scaled crevices. At the top it thins out into ligaments creepily reminiscent of entwined fingers. There’s a stut stut stut sound coming from a thin gap at the tips of one of the fingers, a small space opening and closing. Below it is a deep indent, smoothed out like a bowl, with liquid gathered in it. Butterflies wriggle out of the liquid, shake their wings and take flight.

Allison whistles. ‘That’s unfortunate.’

Lydia crouches low to the ground and picks up a handful of dirt; it falls through her fingers loosely into scales. ‘That might be an understatement.’

The tree’s rustle and quiet. The blood soaked butterflies gather around the monolith, covering every inch. The beat their wings in time, forming a steady 3/4 beat before bursting off the pillar and streaking into the sky. A bunch with wings the same colour as Jackson’s eyes swoop down and head toward where Lydia and Allison are standing. They both move back to avoid them and tumble behind a large rock.

In the pale shimmering light that bounces off the monolith, three men emerge walking trance like toward the statue. Butterflies float off the pillar and sit between their eyebrows. Allison punches her shoulder; you don’t drag someone out into the middle of the forest to a blood soaked altar for tea and some snacks. One of the men blinks, eyes flashing to blue, and for a moment she thinks it’s Derek. Blue eye’s snap to hers and she swallows her heart and her bile.

Wrong Hale.


	4. peter hale, first sonata

\--

Interlude - Peter Hale, First Sonata

\--

  
  
Peter starts as a hunter.  
  
The rest is...unintentional  
\--  
  
Well, no, Peter _starts_ as a tiny firefly with the bright leaking out of him, with fire wrapping thin fingers around his throat like a scarf and wearing him out. He starts because a spark is a flame is a flare and all sparks need to burn full before they can snuff out, that’s just physics. That’s just how the universe unravels.  
  
Yes, that’s better; it starts because the universe unravels.    
  
\--  
  
‘Werewolves are monsters there’s no point hiding that,’ his sister says with her legs spread pushing a child into the world. She’s calm and contained, like always, not even the chaos and gore of birth can ruffle her. Peter has always liked that about her. It’s just her and him and their great aunt, only the wolves in the room. She’d nearly torn her husband open when he’d tried to hold her hand. Hazard of being a wolf; mother instinct, alpha instinct, makes her three times as volatile when helpless.  
  
‘The trick is knowing how to use it to your advantage.’ Peter says.  
  
His sister nods and grips his hand too tight as she gives the final push and a tiny screaming thing bursts forth. It’s all very macabre.    
  
\--  
  
He is his sister’s morally misaligned huntsman. The others don’t like to talk about it.  
  
They were born together, his sister curled around him, his fingers lightly gripped her ankle the entire first night they slept in the same cot. She lead and he followed. His sister has eyes as cold as ice and a personality to match. He’s the softer of the two and that’s hilarious when you think about it. They’re of the same mind half the time, his sisters’ claws, his soft words, her soft tongue in someone’s guts, his hands ripping open thighs. It’s peaceful in its horridness.

He and his sister grow up inside the battle engine of the ever escalating Hunter-Witch wars. Their mother’s lover is a powerful witch and Beacon Hills becomes a very attractive prospect for the magically inclined. Peter grows up in the soft, dark womb of magic with all the death and blood that entails. It taints him in a way nothing else ever will. It is one of the few things he doesn’t share with his sister.

Talia is alpha born. She mates young to a handsome malleable _human_ man. He’s older than her, 24 to her barely 17, tall, dark, soft spoken and highly educated; the human son of a New York pack. It is the _only_ emotional decision she ever makes. Lucas is not what Peter would have chosen for her which is almost entirely because the only person he would have chosen for her is himself. Still Lucas is sweet in ways Talia is not and when his first child comes into the world it’s his hands that wash it, his that cradle the new born life and hold it steady. Talia may be an alpha but she has very rarely been a nurturer.

This, like almost everything about his sister, suits Peter just fine.

‘You’ll understand.’ Talia says from their back porch, eyes tinged red and watching Lucas play with their child. She’s hostile to even the slightest perceived threat to their relationship, even when it’s Peter.

‘I’m sure I will.’ He says.

He doesn’t really think that. His sister doesn’t either.

\--

There is a place deep inside himself where Peter knows he should have kept something small and hopeful. Kept the sort of smiles Lucas gives freely to the person working the register of the supermarket. Kept the careful cradling of Talia’s claws on her child’s soft belly.

He was one of two born and sometimes when he looks at his sister he sees the thing he could have been and the things she may have eaten out of him before he even took a breath.

\--

Lucas takes Laura from his arms every time he see’s Peter holding her. He’s subtle, never brings it to Talia’s attention. Peter and Lucas have an understanding. Just as Peter will never have her soft hands, Lucas will never have her teeth at his throat. Still Lucas doesn’t trust him. It’s the only reason Peter puts up with as much of him as he does.

Peter wouldn’t hurt Laura, it wouldn’t even occur to him. He says as much.

Lucas looks at him for a very long time, says, ‘you wouldn’t hurt her because she’s Talia’s.’

Peter would have thought that was obvious.

Lucas frowns, ‘she will not _always_ be Talia’s.’

‘Now that doesn’t make any sense at all.’ Peter drawls, ‘she’s _Talia_.’

\--

His mother’s lover is an old woman in the sense that she has spent a very long time fitting the definition of _living._ There is a very strong argument for her having never been truly alive.

‘How do you do it?’ He asks her one day as they sit in a grave, Peter shucking the meat off a man’s bones, laying it down flat in a deep obsidian circle.

The woman looks it him for a very long time. It’s not him she’s looking at. It’s his future.  His past. The shared connection between the two.

‘Worms,’ she says finally, ‘and the sort of darkness that eats away at souls.’

Peter considers the woman’s gnarled hands. Her price is obvious in the construction of her body. The holes it contains. ‘What if you didn’t have one?’

‘Not have what?’

‘A soul.’

The woman smiles, too quick and too feral, ‘then I have something to teach you.’

\--  
  
He is skating the edge of 18 when he meets _her_. Tall, brunette, eyes that could light fires. She smells like nothing, like empty space he should fill up. Stalking her leads to a beat up motel and a stolen car. She has eight passports hidden in the back seat all with a first name playing on Margaret. There is a gun and a small ornate bird, heavy with gold and blue, in the glove box.   
  
He goes home with the scent of _nothing_ heavy and thick at the base of his spine. He’s not quiet when he lets it out, shreds his room and goes to his sister with eyes too wide and wanting for a quick hunt. She’s angry. He doesn’t care. He has a space to fill up and it is not under his sister’s hand. 

\--

The motel again and she’s waiting with a bat and a gun.  
  
‘Your name?’ She asks with steady hands clicking off the safety, ‘I’ll know if you lie.’  
  
Jaws snap, teeth lengthen. ‘It’s not Margaret.’   
  
‘What?’ She says with big doe eyes. She doesn’t mean them, though. Peter can clearly see the blood that fills her from tip to tip, welling in her cheeks, putting the glow in her big eyes, pulsing at the red tip of her nose. It’s other people’s blood. It’s her _prey’s_ blood.  
  
‘Your name is not Margaret.’ He tries again, less teeth, less wolf.  
  
‘ _Mieczyslawa,_ ’ she says with an easy flourish and a mean smile. The gun goes down a fraction moving to his stomach. She won’t kill him.  
  
‘Polish.’  
  
‘English.’ Her accent dips into something filthy and educated. ‘Goodbye.’  
  
‘Dinner?’ He grins. He doesn’t get off on pain but he might like anything from her.   
  
‘No.’ She picks up the bat, fires the gun and when he wakes up next he’s chained to the bed with wolfsbane steadily poisoning him through his stomach wound.  
  
A chase, then.  
  
\--

It takes a month for his stomach lining to regrow. It’s excruciating. Margaret spends the month committing petty crime and being dragged from place to place in one of the young deputies vehicles.

Talia visits heavy with her second child. She holds his hand her claws digging into his palm.

‘You almost left me.’ She says. ‘You shouldn’t do that.’

Peter listens to the clock in his room. In every passing beat he can feel her _nothingness,_ can feel his sisters bite. 

\--  
  
His family worries when he follows her to New York. She steals a painting, he steals a piece of territory from an over ambitious omega, she almost lets him fuck her. Thirteen states end the same way and when he’s brushing twenty one she nails his feet to the floor.  
  
‘I’m getting married.’ She leans too close. ‘I’m pregnant.’

_Pregnancy_ , Peter thinks sourly, _always with the motherhood_. ‘He can’t keep you.’  
  
She smiles softly, so sad and happy at the same time, ‘that’s the problem. I’m sick of making him chase me. I want to steal him and it might take the rest of my life.’  
  
He might just kill the guy. ‘So.’  
  
‘So if you come near me, him, or my baby, I’ll take your bones out of your skin one by one. It’s been fun, Hale.’ She smiles and he can feel the motherly glow. The power that radiates off her.   
  
She doesn’t take the nails out of the floor.

  
\--

Margaret loses her first two babies. It’s killing her too. It’s all the town can talk about. Lucas brings up offering to help, Derek’s sweaty, ill, body pressed against his front. Talia takes the child from him and he squeals as he moves.

‘It wouldn’t help us to save that woman.’ She holds her hands to Derek’s back and takes his sickness. Derek falls limp and then asleep. Peter does nothing but turn the page of his book. He doesn’t snarl. Doesn’t tense. 

When Talia leaves to put her child to bed Lucas turns to him, says, ‘I’m sorry.’

Peter doesn’t respond. Doesn’t tense. Doesn’t do anything.

\--

The one big fight Lucas and Talia ever have happens just after the birth of Mscislaw. Derek sits in the comfort of Peter’s lap while Laura, ingrained her whole life to not trust Peter, sits as far away as possible. Ignoring the tension between her parents she practices shifting individual parts of her face. Right nostril, left eyebrow, right hand, left foot. Laura will be an alpha.  

‘I couldn’t let her die.’ Lucas screams.

Talia hisses. ‘We’re werewolves. We shouldn’t be using magic.’

‘She could be an ally, she’s-’

‘-a monster.’ Talia snaps.

‘A mother.’ Lucas snarls. ‘You two are more alike than either of you know.’

‘I would eat her.’ Peter can hear the shift in her voice. Can hear Lucas’s heartbeat double up.

‘She’s the matching half of _your twin_.’ Lucas says archly. ‘Do you think she _couldn’t_ give as good as she got?’

Talia doesn’t answer. Peter sighs, tucks Derek in closer, and tells him about the first werewolves.

\--

On a whim Peter visits her house when her husband’s out. Her son is sitting on the front step chatting to something only he can see. Peter has no doubt that something’s there, even if it’s not residing on this particular plain of reality.  
  
Her son is pretty and Peter wants to eat him. He stays away from her not because he wants to but because she is as close as he’s going to come to an equal and he can respect a predators den.   
  
They grow older, separately, and he seethes with every layer of age and care that comes over her.  
  
\--  
  
There is the beginnings of a fire which will become a civil war between the Argents and the Deveraux.   
  
‘At least,’ Talia says with Derek curled into her arm and Laura tucked around her sleeping husband on the bed, ‘that is what I’m pushing for.’  
  
‘Why?’  
  
‘I have visions sometimes of this house and the woman that will burn it down.’  
  
And that sounds terrible, doesn’t it? But he knows just as he knows that his sister is playing three moves ahead that as long as the blood of their family owns these woods nothing can truly burn them. ‘Let me kill her.’  
  
‘You will,’ she tucks Derek into her throat. Derek is such a small thing to his sisters rough and tumble, smaller still to the unwavering intelligence of his brother. All heart and no muscle. ‘She’ll be older. We’ll all be older.’  
  
Peter frowns. ‘How much older?’  
  
His sister sighs and gently lays her youngest next to his father. ‘We have great plans to make and you’re the only one I trust.’  
  
‘Of course.’ On a whim he checks Derek’s breathing, soft, steady, stronger than he expected.  
  
‘He’ll break my heart.’ She says.  
  
‘I won’t.’ He replies.  
  
Derek sleeps on.  
  
\--  
  
Trouble comes in the form of a man in a beat up car like _she_ used to drive. He watches her child when he walks home. He follows her husband to work. He is like Peter used to be.  
  
So Peter kills him and takes his warm heart home for the wolves to feed on.  
  
More men come and Margaret comes to him once with a man’s name on her lips and a plan.  
  
‘Once more unto, Hale.’ She says mean lipped around a cigarette. She’s greying out, thinning out, but she is still as she was. Still a woman he wants to fill up. Still wasting herself.  
  
He scowls. ‘I’m not a dog.’  
  
She smiles with a cigarette clenched in her teeth. ‘You are when it comes to me.’  
  
He doesn’t mind. His sister says much the same thing.  
  
\--  
  
Margaret cracks the man’s skull and screams long words into the opening. She performs the cruellest magic he’s ever seen with a mother’s love, kisses the corpse, and goes home to her family. Eight people die and his teeth are slick with blood and the matted taste of nothingness that clings to her still.  
  
He kisses his sister with that mouth after a month of being away. His sister’s eyes are wide and red and so very, very inhuman.  
  
\--  
  
His sister lays out the herbs. He recognises the combination. It’s for a human.   
  
‘We’ll have to kill her.’ His sister says and for the first time he hesitates.   
  
‘Why?’  
  
‘Because,’ Talia says patiently, ‘I’m selfish and you’re mine.’  
  
And that is the end of that.  
  
\--  
  
Margaret dies on a hospital bed with her hand clutched in her husband’s. The child sits in the hallway still speaking to invisible monsters. The boy reaches around the air for a hug, the air ruffles across his clothes, cools the whole building noticeably. Peter feels’ the moment she passes, a very small tired part of him detaching and floating away. As it does a constellation of spots and marks springs up on the boy’s skin. The child cries, of course, screams when he finds his mother’s body slipping away. Peter wonders, briefly, if the child would have been a wolf in another life.  
  
Probably not.  
  
\--

He marries, for convenience, and his wife is long limbed and golden, silver eyes, silver hair, and a deep set dead smile on her face. Alia is like him in her coldness and while it is nothing like _her_ it is as close as he comes to genuine friendship.

‘We will not have children,’ she says one day. Peter nods.

‘You’re not her and I’m not him,’ and that is truly the end of that.

He has a fist full of her hair in his hand when the Argents set them alight, a fist full of silver, as he slits Alia’s throat rather than watch her burn with him.

\--  
  
He keeps the softest skirt she owned and three rings. After the fire has burnt him out he holds the silk over his skin and shreds it, shreds himself. His skin slips and slides, the women that filled it up dead and burnt and dead. The empty place inside him that was contained grows and eats away at every other part. He used to think he was empty and broken, now he’s learning just how much he had.   
  
\--  
  
In the future, a field.  
  
There’s a girl with the same smart eyes and an ozone that clings to her. Too big for her body. Enough room for him, if he wants.  
  
In the future, a boy.  
  
It’s been years and years and years of burning and he can still smell _her_ on him. _The nothingness_. It’s cloying around his heart, the sort of soothing that leaves a dull ache that just makes him madder.   
  
In the future, a son.  
  
And his nephew so far away from the woman who birthed him. Big, big, red eyes he doesn’t deserve even a little. All heart, no muscle.  
  
In the future,   
  
Possibility.  
  
\--


	5. unfortunate unravelling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so this was the longest 11,000 words of my whole entire life. 
> 
> we're nearly there!

\--

Act IV – Unfortunate Unravelling

\--  
  
‘So we know what to look for now.’ Allison says, laying out maps on the floor of the cafe.  
  
Lydia kicks the edge if a table, rattling the stacks and stacks of papers sitting on it. She has the file that Evelyn gave her in her hands. ‘Giant bloody altar pillar things.’    
  
‘A lot more common than you’d think.’  
  
‘Let’s hope not.’ Lydia blinks slowly, once, then twice, and then says, ‘this is some of the intel I’ve gathered.’

Allison doesn’t even look at Lydia as she takes the papers, her hand drops a with the weight when Lydia lets go.

‘Wow. You were keeping this back.’ Allison blinks a little, as if she’s baffled by the idea that anyone in the room is holding more cards than her, ‘I’d be mad but it was probably smart.  My family and,’ she looks at the name at the top, flinches almost imperceptibly, ‘Stiles are at the top of our list of suspects. I doubt my family’s involvement. They wouldn’t come back here unless it was to set it on fire. Stiles would.’ She puts the papers down and pulls out her phone. ‘He would but not for himself.’

‘Oh?’

‘He only ever did the worst of it for others.’  
  
‘Still did it.’

Allison’s hand clenches, her nail slipping across the screen. ‘We have to have what hope we can hang on to.’

Lydia opens her moth to something caustic like _what good is hope when you’re friends are all murderers_ or _what did it do for me, of for you, or for your child_ when Evelyn, closely followed by Jeremy, emerge through the kitchen. Evelyn has her too thin hair pulled tight away from her face, a stack of magazines in her arms, Jeremy’s hand on her ass, and a barely concealed frown directed at Allison. Allison doesn’t even acknowledge their entrance.

‘Who are they?’ Allison says.

‘Jeremy and Evelyn,’ Jeremy says brightly, ‘honour to meet you.’

‘Friends staying with me.’ Lydia says. ‘Evelyn’s a scholar.’

Evelyn nods at the folder in Allison’s hand. ‘I helped collate all of this.’

‘You’re very good.’

‘Thank you, Ms Argent.’ Evelyn says with an air of forced civility. Allison gives her a tight smile. Evelyn holds Allison’s gaze for a few long moments before giving it up and walking to the furthest corner from Allison. For the first time her cafe feels claustrophobic. Jeremy sighs dramatically and leaves to make a phone call.

‘Okay.’ Lydia says when Evelyn is thoroughly engrossed in a magazine. ‘What was that?’

Allison says, her back is straight now, foot planted with her weight on it, ready to spring. ‘Political disagreement.’

It’s more than that, Lydia can see that a mile off, but she lets it be.

Allison makes numerous adjustments and changes to Evelyn’s notes, the scratch of Allison’s pen alternating with Evelyn’s turning pages. Jeremy comes back in breaking the silence, Allison looks speculative for a moment and if Lydia hadn’t been staring straight at Evelyn she’d have missed the look of sheer hatred that passes over her face.  

‘Hmm.’ Allison leans over the maps and draws a circle. ‘I’ll be gone for a week or two, but I should have a solution when I get back.’ With that Allison simply stands up, Leader of the People mask already fixing itself into place as she walks out of the room. Evelyn jerks out of her chair and stalks over to the window next to Lydia. 

‘You were very subtle.’

‘I hate her.’ Evelyn spits out. ‘I hate all of them. If they’d just done what they were meant to and gone through with the ritual my House wouldn’t have burnt down.’

‘I think you’ll find most people object to being executed.’

‘Alright then Lydia,’ Evelyn sighs ‘what makes their lives worth so much more then the thousands they’ve taken since?’

Not a single thing.

Lydia sighs. ‘You really hate them.’

‘No. I hate what they’ve cost me.’ She tilts her head towards the window where they can clearly see Jeremy talking to Allison, a look of vague reverence on his face and calculation on hers, ‘and what they might cost me still.’

\--  
  
‘I hate my job.’  
  
Derek snorts. ‘No you don’t.’  
  
‘Let’s pretend you understand social cues for thirty seconds, okay?’  
  
‘I’m sorry,’ Derek assumes a posture of polite composure, ‘what is your inane, non life threatening worry?’  
  
Lydia sighs and dramatically leans back in her chair. The library is suspiciously empty. ‘Just because it won’t kill me doesn’t mean it’s not important.’  
  
Derek snorts in a way that suggests that unless she’s in immediate danger of a disability it’s not worth mentioning. ‘By all means, tell me.’  
  
So she tells him, leaving out her personal worries and her visit from Allison, about running a business that requires talking to people, fighting with Louisa about Stiles, her burgeoning and emotionally terrifying relationship with Scott, intermixed with details about what she’s learned. It ends up being far more ‘relationship problem’ then ‘there’s a cult trying to kill me and also maybe your pack’. To his credit Derek sits there the whole way through even when he obviously begins to regret asking.  
  
‘So apart from the bit about the two attractive runaways who now sleep in your home that I do not want to know about _at all_ because that would mean being involved when it inevitably blows up in your face,’ he says like he’s looking forward to it, ‘it sounds pretty ordinary.’  
  
She takes five seconds to wonder about how stuff like that get’s ordinary, ‘why would it blow up in my face?’  
  
‘Wolves are kind of territorial.’ He shrugs faux casual. ‘Did you know there is a patrol that circles your shop every 45 minutes?’  
  
‘Ugh.’ Lydia’s nose scrunches up. ‘Dating a vampire was easier. At least then I knew he just wanted me to have a baby for him to eat.’  
  
‘I wouldn’t mention that.’ Derek taps a finger against the table. ‘You’re doing fine, in any case.’  
  
Lydia looks at his finger taping against the wood. ‘I guess I am.’  
  
‘We don’t have to-’ He starts and stops.  
  
‘Um.’ Shit, they’re _friends,_ like,go out and have a drink, go home and throw up on each others shoes but not really mind because hey _blackmail_ , friends.  
  
‘I’ll just-’  
  
‘Let’s go get really drunk.’ Lydia half rises from the table. ‘Like completely wasted. To the point where you’re kind of tipsy and I am on the edge of alcohol poisoning. And then we should make fun of people’s life choices.’  
  
Derek hesitates. ‘Only if you promise not to bring up any of mine.’  
  
And because they’re friends and it’s pretty much impossible to top Derek _everything I touch crumbles and dies_ Hale’s life for pure bang for buck emotional torture she says, ‘not a chance, but I promise to pay for your drinks.’  
  
Derek shrugs, nods, holds out a hand.  
  
\--

Derek pulls up in front of her bakery the next morning. At some point she’d stolen his shirt and ripped a ladder in her stockings. Derek has a huge hickey sucked under his ear that shows no signs of fading, no shirt, and glitter in a pulled up patch of his hair. They both lean against his car staring at the front door where there is a frankly terrifying amount of blood dripping from underneath down into the streets.

‘ _Fuck_ ing witches.’ Derek says astonished, ‘have fun.’

Lydia slaps him lightly on the shoulder. ‘What kind of friend are you?’

‘One who spent most of his twenties trying to stop Stiles Stillinski from doing whatever he wanted. I’m smart enough to stay away.’ Derek gets up and slips into his car, blares the horn twice. Lydia rolls her eyes but stands up obligingly.

‘You are a bad person.’

Derek snorts. ‘I’m sure _that_ one will keep me up at night.’

She watches Derek’s car slip around a corner, screws up her courage, pushes open her front door.

Inside is _not_ any better than outside.

The tables are shoved together, men and women Lydia has never seen before in various stages of undress lying across them all bleeding too quickly from open wounds. The wounds are deliberate. The scent of herbs and sulphur is thick on the air. She see’s Louisa slip into the kitchen and come out again with a big bucket of reddish water and drop it all over the ground. The water swirls around and collects the blood from the wounds, heals them, returns to Louisa’s bucket swishing around. Louisa leaves again and Lydia can distinctly pick up the scent of baking blood.

‘What is _happening_ here?’ Lydia crosses her arms. ‘None of you pay rent; you don’t get to bleed on anything of mine.’

‘I do,’ Louisa calls out, ‘and we’re mid-ritual, shut up.’

Lydia huffs and puts her bag down on the one non-blood covered table. After a moment she picks the bag up and goes outside, works her way through an entire pack of cigarettes while she waits on the doorstep.

Eventually Stiles slips out covered in more gore than Lydia can stand to look at. He steals her last cigarette. ‘What happened?’

‘You know,’ Stiles says tiredly. ‘You could not have chosen a worse possible time to move back.’  
  
‘What a brilliant and concise explanation.’

‘Don’t,’ the puff of smoke whistles out of Stiles chest, the sound of old lungs. What kind of magic has he been casting? ‘Any other day I would go round for round with you.’

‘Not today?’

‘Scott will be back soon,’ the cigarette ashes fall onto the wind. The wind smells like the woods.

‘You won’t tell me until he gets here.’

Stiles smiles cruelly. ‘Even you, Lydia, would need to see this to believe it.’

They wait hours with Stiles warming the air between them. After awhile the scents shift; the smell of the woods on fire mixing with the smell of the woods under the sea, the smell of decay. His scent shifts and shakes and becomes less human, less _possible,_ with every passing second. She doesn’t know when she begins to hear it, when the sound of thundering paws hits the asphalt and the sea-fire-wood smoke smell shifts to the stillness of the lake at night, the impossible density and wildness of the untouched woods. She doesn’t know why she knows that that’s what the smell is.

It emerges through a shivering hole of air, her eyes aching when she looks at it. It stands tall, seven feet at least, covered in deep green moss. It’s wolf shaped, long legs, fur, a pointed snout, but the eyes in its head are eerily human, its paws are tapered out like they could very easily be hands, would-be antlers sweep downward from behind it’s over large ears to rest squarely along its shoulders. It’s gorgeous and Lydia wants to throw up. It walks until it’s a few metres away, eyes focused on Lydia unwaveringly. Whatever’s looking at her is too old. It’s too inhuman.

Stiles stands, giving her a light kiss on the head, and walks toward it arms out stretched. The wolf thing walks towards him and opens its jaws revealing three long rows of teeth. Stiles throws something –red, bloody, the same heavy smell from inside permeating the air. It swallows and with a hollowed out scream, like everything in the woods dying at once, shrivels and swirls into the shape of a man. In to Scott.

‘What is going on?’ Lydia shrieks.

Scott grins at her, not at all self conscious about his nudity, and rolls his shoulders. ‘The Argent’s aren’t the only family and me and Stiles made a choice. We, uh, we opted to enter into a non-negotiable mostly one way contract with-  Well- It Doesn’t have a name. But Stiles is the shield and I am the sword. It was very symbolic.’  
  
‘Okay.’ Lydia pointedly looks at his shoulder, ‘why did you have to ruin my deposit?’  
  
‘We _didn’t._ I’m not going to hurt you.’ Scott says, like she was concerned about that. ‘Can’t with the immunity. So I need you to watch over me while I go take care of some things.’  
  
You can’t turn someone’s place of business into a giant bio hazard and then ask for a favour. If Scott hadn’t just turned into an impossible Guardian of the Earth she’d say as much. ‘Like?’  
  
‘Like ridding the woods of some very nasty mean men with some very nasty magic.’ She full body flinches at the murderous intent. ‘Lydia,’ he sighs, ‘I’m no danger to you.’  
  
‘But you’re dangerous.’  
  
‘That’s been true for a long while now.’  
  
‘I guess so.’ Lydia really wishes she had another cigarette. ‘Why me?’  
  
‘I need an anchor,’ he tugs a shirt on, somehow just as attractive as taking his shirt off would be.

‘And you want me?’

He rolls his eyes. ‘Obviously.’

On one hand Lydia apparently doesn’t know nearly as much about Scott as she thought she did. Whatever you call their not quite relationship it probably should involve mentioning whatever he just turned into. On the other hand Scott obviously trusts her enough to let her in on the secret. That cools a lot of her anger. ‘What would I have to do?’

‘Go camping with me.’

Her nose scrunches up. ‘Is that a _joke?_ ’

‘Nope. Camping.’ Scott lifts an eyebrow. ‘I won’t even make you eat a rabbit.’

‘I see how it is,’ Stiles says mock-grudgingly, ‘the girl gets the star treatment.’

Scott flutters his eyelashes. ‘Her eyes are prettier.’

‘Boys,’ Lydia snaps. ‘I am doing you the great favour of not freaking the fuck out right now. Shut up and tell me what I need to know.’

The moment of levity dies. Stiles grimaces, ‘sorry, you’ll go out on to the preserve, Scott will do what’s necessary but he’ll need you to remind him of his humanity when the bloodlust starts. Just follow him around he’ll make sure nothing happens to you.’

‘Nothing will happen to you,’ Scott says with a dazzling small and unfocused eyes. He looks high, she realises, like he’s not fitting into his skin properly.

‘Need to go inside buddy?’ Stiles says. He’s already hauling Scott in by a friendly arm, tugging down the shirt to cover Scott’s modesty. Scott is having very _little_ of modesty today. Lydia uses the time it takes for them to go inside to hurtle through her options. She could say no and leave Scott unanchored and possibly get a whole bunch of people eaten by the metaphysical representation of her local preserve. She could say yes, somehow find insurance against Scott and put him down if he attacks her which would result in Stiles murdering her. She could go out without insurance and have Scott decide half way through that no, he doesn’t like her that much and she looks very _tasty_ in a secluded part of the woods.  

Or she could trust Scott.

It’s not the smart option but it is the one that appeals most.

‘I’ll do it.’ She says to Stiles when he settles down next to her again. She can hear the screams and shouts as someone inside turns on the music, can all but feel the champagne dizziness of the party starting up. Stiles shivers at the noise.

‘Not fond of bacchanalia?’

‘I’m a witch, after a certain point it’s required.’ Stiles rubs along the thick scar on his neck. ‘No, you know my family history; no one wants someone like me to lose control all at once. I should fall into madness slowly, so slowly I don’t notice until my humanity is a loose memory, plucked with a few well placed words. That’s how it should go.’

‘I would have preferred for it to happen all at once. Amazingly enough a slow descent doesn’t stop it from being _a fall_ ,’ Lydia smiles, ‘of course I would also liked to have had a choice in my madness.’

‘That _would_ be nice.’ Stiles sighs. ‘Don’t let anything happen to him.’

Lydia stares and stares. The man next to her is cold and calculated in a way she couldn’t even begin to imagine. He’s got his fingers in her best friends’ brain. He’s got an almost cult like group of people following him, ready and willing to bleed for him. He’s got a smile he keeps for his best friend and his best friend only. When Lydia looks at Stiles all she see’s is an amalgamation of desperate bargains made too young. He’s a man fast running out of time. It occurs to her that there may be a madness lying somewhere beyond her own and that Stiles is destined to meet it hard and fast.

‘What?’ He says irritably.

‘I keep trying to figure out what stayed the same.’

‘Not enough.’ He tries to smile. It brings out the deep set tiredness in his eyes. ‘It’ll take three days. The spell tends to bring out things in us so don’t be surprised if he’s...different.’

Lydia nods. They sit together as time blends together, the revelry from inside growing more frightening.

\--

‘I did not think this through.’ Lydia yanks on her gloves, ‘Scott. Come back here now.’

Scott is refusing to so much as entertain the notion of listening to her. He’s in full wolf form, deep brown and amber fur and sharp claws. For the past four hours Lydia has been trailing behind him through the woods and undergrowth, stopping when he makes her, cleaning the blood from his snout every time he wanders off and comes back blooded.

This time Scott comes back with flower petals decorating his ruff and muzzle, a lone flower in his jaw.

‘You look ridiculous.’ Lydia says even as she takes the flower. ‘How is anyone scared of you?’

Scott growls mockingly at her and bounds away. A moment later Scott appears naked and pleased about it.

Scott smiles, dirt ground into the dimples of his face. His eyes are too bright, too shiny. He can’t focus on her. ‘Lydia. If you like that dress you should take it off right now.’

Lydia stills. That’s a huge red flag. ‘Who says I’m fucking you in a forest.’

‘Ms Martin are you _running away?_ ’ Scott’s smile turns a tiny bit mean at the edges. ‘You can if you want.’

Lydia does her best to turn down her fast beating heart. ‘How far would I get?’

‘It would depend on how serious I thought you were,’ he says playfully, ‘five minutes if you were and ten if you weren’t. I’d be a little worried if you were more than fifteen away.’

‘Now?’

‘Usually. I’ve been told I can be suffocating in relationships.’

‘Allison.’

‘A few others too.’ Scott tilts his head, eyes focusing on her for a moment. ‘It’s freaking you out.’

‘You don’t generally see the hind brain quite so present.’

‘That came very close to a bad dog joke.’ The predatory glint in his voice stays although Lydia thinks the danger has passed. ‘I’m not nice. I’m kind, generous, apparently over protective, but I am not _nice_.’

‘I can think of at least ten people who would disagree with you.’

‘You’d have to know ten people first.’

‘You are being such an ass.’

‘Not nice. Kind. Generous. Protective.’ He throws up a finger as he lists them off, ‘and as you said before it’s not exactly my higher functions talking.’

‘Then I am definitely not fucking you.’ Lydia folds her arms. ‘It’s kind of skimming non consensual as is.’

‘I won’t push you.’ He says despite clearly not understanding the decision at all. ‘But seriously, sex would be awesome.’

‘I’m sure you think so.’ She says amusedly. ‘I don’t.’

Scott sighs again and moves carefully and quickly towards her. Lydia stays still, somehow. His hands drift up her arms, not intentionally sexual. She still takes it that way. ‘How long will this last.’

‘Two days.’ He says nose to nose with her. Between one blink and the next he’s a few metres away, lounging against a rock on the ground. ‘You should sit over here.’

Lydia looks at the ground disapprovingly. ‘This dress cost more than everything you’re wearing.’

‘I’m wearing shorts.’

Lydia looks from Scott’s abs, to his bare feet tough skinned from bare foot walking, the tattoo’s that stretch across almost all of his skin. Then she looks to the woods, to the trees, to the sharp quiet occasionally pierced by birds. Scott is different here, calmer. Her face cracks into a smile, her voice into a laugh. ‘This is so weird.’

‘The only thing that’s changed is the filter.’ Scott tilts his head back, throat exposed. ‘I’ve been a wolf for over a decade now, me and the monster inside have grown together. Most of what you’re seeing are instincts, yes, but they’re still mostly me.’

Lydia crouches down next to him just so she can pat him mockingly on the head. ‘Honesty as a werewolf instinct.’

‘Nah. That one’s me.’ He looks up at her, yellow eyed, and she can see where this is going. ‘You should-’

‘No.’

‘I’d never-’ Scott growls a little, hand snatching one of hers. ‘Why exactly don’t you want to have sex with me?’

‘I don’t like to take advantage of people.’

Scott blinks. ‘Was that a joke?’

‘No.’  

He starts to laugh. ‘Lydia. No one will ever believe that. Come on, I won’t judge you.’

‘It’s the reason I said.’

Scott gives her a solemn look. ‘You can say stop and I can say stop and I promise you we will both stop.’

‘You’re not in control and I couldn’t fight you off.’

‘You know I use you as an anchor, right?’ He says apropos of nothing.

‘Since when?’

He shrugs. ‘A couple weeks after you first got here?’

Right. It’s Scott McCall. ‘I hope you remember this when you’re all back and I hope you remember to never tell anyone anything like that again because it’s very creepy.’

‘Werewolf.’

‘Can still be prosecuted by the law.’

‘Not in this town.’ He smiles as seriously as he can. ‘Lydia. I will stop myself. If you still want to say no, that’s okay too.’

Lydia huffs. ‘I don’t _want_ to say no but I do not want to rape you.’

‘You’re _not._ ’

‘You can’t take bodily autonomy for granted and we both know that.’ She snaps.

He looks startled. A second later she’s tucked against him on the ground, his hand flat against her belly, the other curled underneath her breasts. ‘Mmkay.’

She gets her feet flat and starts pushing against the ground. ‘What are you doing?’

One of his legs knocks her off balance, forcing her to lean back a little too hard against him. ‘Snuggling.’ He says. He adjusts them until Lydia is comfortable before audibly sighing. A few moments later he’s asleep, arms like steel traps across her chest. Lydia sits there motionless. His arms aren’t tight bit there’s a stiffness in them that suggests trying to move would be stupid.

Normal Scott, non-wood magic whammed Scott, is a lot like the person napping behind her. Same pushiness, same gentleness, same tactility.  As safe as Lydia is here she can’t help but curse her own stupidity. It’s the differences that make most people dangerous, in Scott it’s the similarity. He has an intense and relentless capacity for empathy that Lydia has never seen in another human being. Lydia doesn’t accept comfort easily but here, with him, with someone who _knows,_ she shuts her eyes and leans back. She forgets, over and over again, that the people Beacon Hills made are anything but ordinary.

Forty five minutes later Scott gently shakes her awake, puts a dinger to her lips and walks away. He strips off his shorts as he goes, throwing them in the vicinity of a tree branch.  

Lydia, because for four and a half minutes after she wakes up she is incapable of saying something smart, says. ‘Are we going back to the sex thing?’

‘Nah.’ Scott looks at her over his shoulder, emphasising the tattoos that drip down his shoulder blades. ‘I was going to go kill some people and then I was going to get us some food.’

‘I have MRE’s.’

‘Ew.’ His nose scrunches. ‘I saved the spanakopita from a few days ago in one of the small hideaways we have around here.’

‘There are hideaways?’

Scott nods at her once, fur wrapping around his body. ‘Stay here and in two hours I’ll bring you food.’

It would be obvious that something was going on with Scott for no other reason than the way he shifts to wolf right in front of her. He grins at her once before loping off.

Lydia sits down when he leaves and puts her head in her hands.

Leaving the obvious consent issues aside the truth is she’s terrified of sleeping with him. He makes her _laugh_ and she doesn’t feel consumed by his touch, like the second his hands touched her skin she was lesser. From the outset she knew that this could turn into something real. Something that means she has to untangle herself. It’s a stupid naive thing to equate change to sex especially when you’re not a virgin and haven’t been for over a decade, but she can’t think of it any other way. If she sleeps with him she will end up having to face being in love with him. Lydia knows full well what kind of strength love brings almost as well as she knows the weaknesses.

The hours stretch peacefully in front of her, nothing but the woods and the birds. Scott takes longer than his two hours so Lydia cracks an MRE and thinks distasteful things about it in her head. Something ruffles the branches above her; she looks up to see a stream of wings fly overhead. Butterflies.

She puts her MRE down and stands up. A single butterfly drops down from above her and lands on a branch above her. It shakes a bit, bright orange wings beating slightly. The butterfly turns towards her and takes off again only to land on her finger, shaking its wings again before taking off again straight up and up...into a mass of spider webs.

‘Caught you,’ a male voice says. He emerges from the tangle of webs, thin and dressed in black; he’s short and bearded, wearing thick black goggles.

The man in black looks at her oddly, ‘you’re still alive?’

‘I don’t know you.’ Lydia says dumbly.

‘Of course not, it let you live.’ He says wonderingly. ‘You’re alive!’

‘Yeah,’ Lydia moves away from the tree she was leaning on, ‘you need to get out of here.’

‘The wolf.’ He nods, still staring dumbstruck at her. ‘You lived.’

‘You need to go.’ She says more firmly. ‘I’m not going to stop them from killing you.’

‘You’re on _their_ side.’ He snarls, ‘you’re with _them._ ’

‘I’m on my side.’

‘Liar, you stink of that beast’s magic,’ he steps closer again, ‘the way a bitch would.’

She’s not safe here. It’s a thought that ricochets through her chest. Idiot girl for forgetting that the only thing she has, she really has, is herself.  

 ‘Did he say he loved you?’ His teeth grow, his eyes blow up into a sickly blue. ‘You’re only human, love. What would ever possess him to do that?’

He’s a wolf, she realises as a shot of adrenaline arcs through her, and she has a weapon for that. She lets herself grow small, lets the doubt in her curl over into her scent, lets him think that she’s frightened, just as she has a million times before.

He stumbles forward eagerly as a knife appears in his hands. For a moment Lydia’s head is a slideshow of similar images. Men coming towards her with intent to harm, her trying to get away, not always succeeding. She hesitates as her hands go up to her hair. He’s getting too close.   

A huge shape leaps from the side, Scott’s jaws snapping across the guys neck as he takes him down. Lydia’s hands are still in her hair. Red mess flung into her face. Scott rips the man’s head off and starts down his body, ripping and shredding. Lydia pulls her hair over her eyes.

She hesitated.

Scott’s hands pull the hair away from her face; he’s clean of blood and wearing his shorts again. She’s lost some time. ‘Are you all right?’

She hesitated. She lost control of herself. She lost-

‘Is it broken?’ She asks, calmly, so much more so then she feels. She lost it, she couldn’t save herself, she was in his power. Thoughts shatter in her head and she wants to do anything else but think.

‘Yeah. So-’ he stops as she rips her stockings in her haste to get them off, ‘wow.’

‘Take off your shorts and then unhook the back of this dress.’ Lydia takes her shoes off and then all but stalks toward him. Scott hesitates to touch her. ‘Unless you don’t want to.’

‘Fuck.’

‘Oh. He get’s it.’

‘Stuff in the car.’

Her hands shake until she gets them on his skin; the contact is warm even as it feels off balance. ‘Presumptuous.’

‘Hopeful.’ Scott smiles, a gentle thing. He falls to the ground dramatically.

She’s unlikely to be gentle.

She holds the tube to her nose and breathes in. ‘Liquorice.’

‘So,’ Scott says with his eyes trained on her and his legs spread wide.

‘So,’ she says, pouring a handful out and warming it between her fingers, she comes to stand between his legs and kicks them out a little wider. Scott rolls his eyes at her but stays otherwise still. She opens her hand, the lube slips over her fingers to splatter on his stomach in long thin lines. She crouches down and presses one short affectionate kiss to the tip of his nose. ‘Can I?’

Scott’s eyelashes flutter and when he focuses on her his eyes are wide, wide, and blown. ‘That’s not how it’s going to work.’

‘Oh,’ she dots more kisses from the corner of his eye to his ear.

‘You keep running,’ he says. Her fingers trail over his heart, wet and slick, over a nipple and back again. His heart jumps when she passes over it. ‘I’m not going to take it.’

‘You seem to be doing a pretty good job of taking it so far.’

‘That is the point.’ He says drily.

Her hands freeze tracing a jumping vein in his groin, he’s hard, so hard that it’s almost angry, like he should be mad about how desperate she’s making him. She lowers her mouth to his clavicle, to the centre mass of his chest, and further down until she’s nearly at face level with his cock. ‘So I choose how this goes.’

He makes a small needy sound. His hands clench at the ground, once, twice, before they settle. She smiles a little. She touches the fingers on his left hand one by one as a thank you. He shudders a little, his cock beading and slowly dripping onto his stomach. She touches tongue to flesh and then takes the head of his cock in her mouth. Immediately he makes a half aborted thrust, muscles obviously working to keep himself from just letting go. She comes off him for a moment, wiping her hand on the mess on his stomach and taking him in her hands, hot to the touch and so, so smooth.  She grips him one way and then another, switching speeds and pressure until he’s swearing lightly under his breath. She makes sure to keep it slow. She’s really not interested in letting this go yet.

‘Is the liquorice lube edible?’ She asks and when the answer is another half thrust and a small sound she takes her hand off altogether. Scott punches out a low moan. ‘Scott. Is it edible?’

His eyes are threaded with gold. ‘Yes, it is, for gods-’ 

‘Good,’ she lets her fingers trail down to finger at his balls on a whim, presses the tips of her nails up against the soft skin.

‘No,’ he says immediately.

‘Okay,’ she leans up to kiss him on the nose again and moves her hands obviously away from his balls, ‘do you want-’

‘ _Lydia_ ,’ he hisses.

‘Should I gag you?’ His eyes and the twitch of his dick say that he wouldn’t find it too terrible. She smiles widely and pushes herself back a little, hushing Scott when he looks like he might follow her. She places both her arms behind her back and leans over his cock again.

‘Show off.’

‘I’ve had a lot of practice.’ She says truthfully.

She takes him down halfway in one go, hollows out and comes back up. On the next stroke she goes a little further down. She repeats it until she’s got a rhythm. She has to adjust when she hits the root of him, thick and long down her throat. Her legs are jammed together as tightly as possible but to keep position she has to widen them, just a little. When she comes up again Scott shakes as he says, ‘I’m gonna-’ mouth working for air and muscles twitching all over the place. She flicks her tongue around the over sensitive vein underneath the head, leaning back to watch as he comes all over his stomach, from his treasure trail to the side of his chest.

All of a sudden the weight of her own arousal hits low in the stomach until it curls into every part of her. She thinks about it pragmatically. His hands, his cock, his mouth, just rubbing off on his leg and calling it done. She reaches one finger to slide underneath her underwear and gasps when she hits slick. She pokes at it, rolls on to it, and before she can start anything good Scott swears low and hard.

‘Ly-’ Scott says, ‘shit, come here, let me, god, _let me._ ’

‘I want you in me.’ She says seriously, crawling till she can feel the heat of him all up her front, one hand pushing down her underwear and the other touching lightly along his arm, ‘I want you to hold down.I want you to eat me out for days. I want you to show me why I shouldn’t just fuck myself on my fingers and leave it all over you. Why I should let you fuck me as hard as your dick says you want to. Why I shouldn’t just fuck _you_ the way you want me to.’ She twines her come slippery fingers in his hair and leans forward, no space between the words and his ear, ‘ _fuck me_ like you want me.’

‘You think I don’t want you.’ His hands dip down to cup her, find a way into her hair and oh, they’re kissing, and what a way to have your first real kiss in ten years. From the way Scott jerks back she’s guessing she said it out loud. ‘Ten?’

There’s something of a lump in her throat. This is not the time for feelings. ‘Those hands could be doing something else.’ 

‘You think I don’t want you,’ he says again dumbfounded, hands fluttering uselessly at her hips, they could be _doing_ something. ‘Nobody thinks that.’

She knows that, she might have always known that. ‘Slip your hand in and lightly along my clit. Fuck me with just the tip of a finger, no more than the first knuckle.’

When he does what she says she nearly clamps her legs shut. He immediately pulls out and spreads his hand so she can’t. She thinks she might say _sorry,_ cold seeping into her before he goes back to doing just what she asked. It stays like that for awhile, flicking lightly on her clit with the promise of more and she lets it warm her up. Makes sure she’s desperate and unafraid when she says, ‘one finger second knuckle, no clit.’

Scott changes pace and hums when her head falls to his shoulder. When it feels like nothing, like this isn’t the first person to touch her like he _cares_ since _him_ , she says, ‘two fingers, scissor lightly, won’t need much.’

A low grunt is the only response and she feels him shift to cant his hips. She almost makes herself get off him, almost move away to see, but he hits along home inside her and she squeals instead. Scott doesn’t say anything, alternates between hitting it and not hitting it, pressing his own hips up and down minutely. When she’s a minute of hard work away from getting what they both want she tells him to move off. He almost snarls at her, presses the blunt of his teeth to her neck and presses down gently.

‘My mouth?’ He says expectantly, and then frowning lightly, ‘am I still not allowed to talk?’

‘You’re terrible at this,’ she looks at his shiny fingers and then looks down to where he’s started trailing them through the mess on his stomach and along to where he’s hard again.

‘I’m gonna ride you now,’ she says as normally as possible, _the sky is blue, the wind is cold, I’m going to fuck you now._ Scott nods and grips her hand lightly when she moves to position herself. The first push is hard; she has to fight her head and her body to go slow. Scott makes noises like she’s beating him instead of giving him what he wants. His hands come to her hips and he _vibrates_ with how much noise he’s making.

She can feel him in her and it feels like there’s not enough, like there couldn’t be, hot and hard and him and she can hear herself _ah ah ah._ Scott moans long and loud and like a switch in her brain she goes off and she just starts talking. ‘Yeah, like that, so good, is this what you’ve been waiting for, me? You’ve got me, hot and ready and, god, is that you or me thrusting huh? You gotta be desperate just, come on now, you can do it, just _let go._ ’

He does on _let_ and it’s on the third thrust when she just can’t stand it that she comes, white lights and teeth chattering together as Scott fucks her through it. His mouth trails open kisses wherever it can reach until he’s got her pressed against him, hard rolls as he gasps out her name. She lets him, warm and satisfied, and kisses him on the side of his face when he comes again. 

\--

Scott feeds her up and lets her go. There’s something about werewolves, some magic, because she smells like him. Not overbearingly so more like she’s been wearing one of his favourite sweaters for so long that it’s wool has loosened into her shape and her into his smell. It’s comforting. There’s a cheerful song on the radio and for fifteen peaceful minutes the world makes sense.

There’s a car the same midnight shade as her own sitting by the side of the road as she exits the forest onto the well driven asphalt. The car’s engine is smoking but the tall person beside it doesn’t care. Zie wouldn’t, being a mechanic. Lydia trundles to a stop next to him. Lydia exits her car and as quick as that zie’s crossed the space between them and stuck a knife into her front wheel. Lydia stands there bemused as her wheel makes a series of pained noises and deflates.

‘Tune up?’ Zie says cheerfully.

Lydia shakes her head. ‘I am too damn tired to do this.’

‘I’ll put it on your tab.’ Zie waves a hand and goes off to fetch things to fix the wheel with.

‘Do I live long enough to pay it off?’ 

‘Knotty Girl, off Lighthow,’ zie says with a sly grin, ‘if you’ve got existential questions.’

‘You’re really enjoying this.’

‘Have you ever heard of quitting while you’re ahead?’ Zie places the crank-whatever thing onto the ground and begins to lift her car up, ‘yes, girl, I am enjoying this very much.’

‘I’ll pay it off.’

‘Of course, dear.’ The wheel is changed in a series of movements Lydia knows she’d never be able to copy. Good thing high heels and red lipstick means she’d never have to. ‘I’m really just here to make sure you get home.’

‘What?’

‘Divine intervention. It wouldn’t do to have you die before you’ve reached your full potential. Which you will if I do not accompany you.’

‘You can’t know that.’

‘Don’t,’ zie says gravely, ‘tell me what I can and cannot know.’

She stops talking, lets him finish, and is only mildly annoyed when he insists on leading the way back home. Zie pulls in just as the early morning light cracks its way onto her windows, parking and getting out to open her door for her.    

‘You meant all the way to the door?’

‘I am a gentleman.’ Zie says haughtily, ‘there will be no unprotected maidens in my presence.’

Lydia shakes her head. ‘Uh huh.’

They walk to the door together. Jeremy and Evelyn are huddled on her stoop while she’s still carrying a pair of dirty underwear in her handbag and carrying a god on her arm. Jeremy’s face, up close covered in minor cuts and bruises, slips into a genuine smile.

Zie spins her and kisses her on the forehead. ‘I’m having a lovely dinner party in about a month!’

Zie walks off as Jeremy and Evelyn stand up. Evelyn dusts off her shirt edged at the hem with blood.  
  
She raises an eyebrow. ‘Come in?’  
  
‘Yes please,’ Evelyn says tiredly, ‘we have news.’  
  
‘Someone tried to break into your shop. We stopped them.’ Jeremy’s tone makes it very clear how they stopped them.

By unspoken agreement they all go upstairs to shower and change.

The numbers that decorate her room are static and solid under her hands when she rests them against the wall. Slowly she takes the sheets off her bed and folds and tucks them into a small fort. The light through the window is all wrong, harsh LA unperturbed by the woods and water of Beacon Hills. She tucks herself into as small a ball as she can manage, when she feels as small as she can she lets herself shake. The light feels thick and oily against her skin, like she’s dried up and can’t take it in.

She untucks her fort and showers, pulls out her favourite green dress. When it comes time to pick her shoes she hovers over the sharp nude pair that would be her go to. Instead she pulls out soft, worn boots and slips them on. Lydia is first down and sets about making breakfast. They join her in the middle of the floor.

Evelyn holds up a stack of playing cards, the eyes of the red queens struck out and replaced with butterflies. She also pulls out a stack of photos, some faces feel familiar but she can’t quite place them. ‘This is what we got off them.’  
  
‘What are these?’  
  
She points to the photos. ‘Well, those are the dead cult members, most of them dead but the ones we believe Stiles people are leaving alive so they can eat their still warm internal organs. They’ll come out full force on the next full moon. So tonight.’  
  
‘Ambience,’ Jeremy adds with a wry smile.

‘The cards are a warning. If we don’t get them they’ll get us.’

Fuck. ‘How screwed are we?’

Evelyn shrugs. ‘If they manage to summon it it’ll probably come after you being a failed sacrifice and all. You’ll die. If we don’t the remaining cult members will hunt you down and you’ll die. Even if the first two don’t happen too many people know about you. You’ll die.’

Cheerful. No matter what she dies.

‘What do we do?’ Evelyn asks.

Lydia mulls it over. Every choice is a bad choice.

‘I don’t know, I have no idea.’ Lydia fetches her coat, ‘come on. I don’t think just _asking_ could do anymore damage at this point.’

No one says anything as they drive over to the BayLaurel building. She parks in front of _feu_ and refuses to take that as any kind of omen. The atrium of BayLaurel is huge and open. The ceiling is very tall and the walls are a clean silver grey colour. It all works together to make a very cold feeling interior. At the end of the room is a chromed gold desk. The woman at the reception desk doesn’t look at them until they’re right in front of her. The air bends differently around her, dragging her shadow into something bigger. A glamour. Perhaps she doesn’t _have_ to look up.

‘I’m sorry but both Mr Stilinski and Mr Hale are out today and will not be accepting new appointments until after the next lunar cycle.’ She pushes a curl of nova bright orange hair back. 

‘I’m Lydia Martin,’ is all she says to the receptionist.

‘Ah,’ the receptionist immediately pushes an orange button on her intercom, ‘Mr Lahey, Ms Martin is waiting in the atrium for you.’

Lydia nods. ‘Gratitude.’  
  
Isaac is impressive in his black on grey three piece suit and sharp patterned tie; a little too formal for most workplaces but it would be the bare minimum a lot of the old ones would accept. He tries his best to dampen a smile as he walks over to them. ‘That’s an outfit.’

Lydia inclines her head, ‘always dress to impress.’

‘What brings you here?’

‘Danaus.’ She gives him a cold smile, ‘it’s time to end it.’

‘This way,’ he leads them through a small entrance way into an empty cafe. He makes a gesture at Jeremy and Evelyn and with an exchange of sharp nods they go off toward the other side of the room. They sit near to the window on low gunmetal grey chairs. ‘That’s not my account.’

‘Whose is it?’

‘Scott’s,’ Isaac pauses, ‘he didn’t tell you?’

‘Since when does anyone in this town tell anyone anything?’ She says sardonically. ‘Why haven’t the...perpetrators been caught?’

‘What’s to catch? No magic here happens without Stiles consent.’ Isaac leans back in his chair, legs apart. ‘Maybe you don’t want to know this.’

‘Maybe.’ She says softly. ‘Can I stop this myself?’

Isaac runs a hand over his head and holds it at the back of his neck. ‘There’s a spell.’  
  
‘Great.’  
  
‘You need some _things._ Things you need a permit for.’  
  
Ah.  
  
‘That shouldn’t be a problem.’  
  
‘You know, both Scott and Derek asked me to make sure you don’t go see him.’  
  
‘How do you intend to do that?’  
  
‘I thought a calm reasonable discussion.’ Isaac shrugs lightly, ‘and then giving up.’  
  
‘Good choice, Cujo.’

Isaac shakes his head, ‘they don’t get it. Not really, not even Scott.’ His face scrunches up, ‘I told them to do it differently. He’ll be at the house all day today, Stiles and Derek are both tied up here.’

‘Thank you.’

Isaac’s face freezes, ‘you got it right with the receptionist, don’t fail now.’

Huh. Who knew? ‘I’ll keep it in mind.’  
  
Isaac shakes his head again and leaves with a handshake. The receptionist’s orange hair glows as they pass by her, she drops her glamour and tree bark erupts across her skin. ‘I gave the list for Peter to your friend to give to you. Have a nice day.’

Lydia smiles. ‘I’ll do my best.’

She drops off Evelyn and Jeremy outside the Yarn Superstore and then begins the meandering trek out of town and back into the woods.

\--  
  
It’s been finished and standing for years but the Hale house is new again to her eyes.  
  
She gets in the door this time. The walls are painted cream, the smell of _living people_ comes through harshly in a way it never has anytime she’s been here before. She walks into the large open living room area, the couches covered in pillows and blankets, the books on tables. There’s bread baking somewhere. She stops to sniff, one baker to another, and almost misses the shivering shadows in the corners. One moment to the next a heavy sense of observation floods all around her. It feels like worms against her skin.

She shivers.

If the man in the woods hadn’t shaken her so badly she never would have made that mistake. The feeling ramps up as she hears footsteps – _his, no one else in this house would_ hunt _her_ \- so quiet behind her, barely moving the air. Lydia can hear her own heart - _too fast, far too fast, get out_ \- speed up until it hurts.

Bile comes up her throat; she forces it down and makes herself walk toward the long dark stone island in the middle of the open plan kitchen. There is bread on the table, cut and layered with jam, her jam, one of the ones they sell. The bread is warm.

Something crashes to the ground at the edge of her vision, a book, green spine, cream pages, and then another on the other side of the room.

‘Poltergeist didn’t scare me much.’ Unlike with Scott her voice shakes, ‘are you done?’

His voice is behind her accompanied by his foot tapping against the floor. ‘You’re getting sloppy. I remember you being better.’

‘You don’t know the first thing about me.’

‘I know _everything_ about you.’

Lydia leans against the counter. ‘That goes both ways.’

‘No it doesn’t.’ Peter says flatly. ‘Why are you here?’

‘Why do you think I’m here?’  
  
‘Because like always you need me.’ He smiles and reaches out to tap her on the nose. ‘Now, what would you like?’  
  
‘This list.’ He reaches for it, he drags his fingers from her wrist, slipping it out of her hand with a gentle sweep. It’s like any other meeting she’s had, it is, it has to be. It doesn’t matter if she’s falling apart on the inside; she just has to _look_ like she’s not. Peter gives her a long lingering stare which she returns. He smiles, appeased, and trots off. The house grows quiet again, heavy with waiting. The Hale house will probably always feel like it’s seconds away from tragedy, the wood is new and glossy but Lydia can see the bare supports beneath, the burnt and uncared for ceiling caving in. It will always feel like a haunted house. The worst part is the fresh bread growing cold on the table top. It feels wrong to smell her jam on something he made. Worse to think that he wakes up every morning just the same as her, walks to his fridge, and picks something she made to eat.

Peter comes back without theatrics, a heavy burlap sack over his shoulder. ‘You have to set this before they try to do their ritual.’

He tosses it at her feet and leaves the room. His footsteps go from loud and sure to dead silent. It’s a power move meant to say that she is beneath him and not worth a moment more of his time. She’s ashamed to say that it works.

Evelyn and Jeremy are sitting around a bowl of pasta salad in the middle of the kitchen when she walks in.

‘So how was hunting?’

‘Fine,’ she lies, stripping off her coat, ‘I have what we need.’

They eat first and then clear her work bench off. Out of the bag come rods made of bone and dried meat, three vials of a thick blue substance with the same stickiness as blood, a small handbook of chants, a small envelope in Peter’s handwriting, a bowl made of teeth, a bundle of dried herbs and a glass bottle.

‘This is dark.’ Jeremy points to the black blood crusted bowl made of teeth. ‘We are going to hell for this.’

‘We we’re going to hell for other things first.’ Lydia opens the envelope and takes out the instructions. ‘We go to where the monolith is before the ceremony, paint the ground, say the magic words, and when they try to make their sacrifice, we close the spell and it will turn inward destroying the monolith.’ Lydia rips up the instructions. ‘I’ll take the paint. Jeremy will patrol the area. Evelyn takes the chanting.’

‘Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to hell we go.’ Jeremy chants. ‘We going now?’

Lydia nods. ‘Might as well.’ 

The monolith is not exactly where Lydia remembers it being so night is creeping in when they arrive. Lydia paints wide rings around the clearing carefully following the pattern on the page. Every so often she bumps against Evelyn moving from point to point in an unmistakably intentional series of lines saying things under her breath and offering things to various deities. The pattern closes at the deep blood filled bowl at the bottom of the monolith. The blood starts to shimmer and bubble.

‘How badly do you think this is going to go?’ Evelyn asks.

‘Let’s put it this way,’ Lydia smiles tightly, ‘I’m glad I’m not married with kids.’

Jeremy joins them cupping Evelyn’s elbow, ‘we’ve got company.’

‘We expected that.’ Evelyn says quietly. ‘Jeremy-’

He pulls her in for a hug. ‘Yeah, Evie. Blah blah final stand blah blah I love you.’

Lydia’s hands feel empty; faintly she can smell Scott on her skin. The comfort of that ebbs out as the night draws tighter around them. Midnight rushes up and still no witches.

‘Wait-’ Evelyn says from her spot tucked into her brother’s side, ‘they’re here.’

They come from all sides bleeding into a centre dark mass in front of the pillars. A few of them lay stones on the ground calling up a thick white slab of marble. From overhead comes a great sound and the sweet smell of pork fat –no, human- the smell grows heavier and thicker on the air until its stuffed up her nose and every gulp of air is like swallowing something covered in slime. Evelyn turns her head into her brothers’ armpit and gasps, ‘this is _actually_ better.’

Lydia and Jeremy both choke out a terrified laugh.

They lay a second set of stones on the marble and a woman appears dressed in white. She’s sandy haired and freckled all over, her skin is death pale against the marble, her head tilts to the side revealing a broken jaw. Thick black ropes tie her down.

‘She used to work at the library,’ Evelyn whispers horrified, ‘she thought I was cute.’

‘You knew they did this,’ Jeremy mutters, ‘you _wrote_ about it.’

‘It wasn’t real.’ Evelyn snaps.

The cloying fatty smell reaches a peak where it feels like it’s pressing in against her eyeballs and then snaps back and dissipates completely. The witches step back and form a circle around the altar. Their voices rise into a chant, black pooling toward the ground and a yellow miasma rising up from it. They chant and chant until the sick yellow has crawled over their boots and made its way to rest under their chins. They raise their hands and all make a cutting gesture at the same time. The girl on the altar begins to scream. They all make another gesture and the girl’s voice disappears. Her mouth is open but there is no more noise. As one they group turns to face a dark patch of the woods directly opposite Lydia.

‘This looks immoral.’ And there’s Stiles, calmly strolling out into the clearing dressed in dark green. More people slip out from behind him. Louisa brings up the rear, dressed in red, fire arcing across her skin. In one gesture Stiles forces the witches surrounding the altar to their knees. Louisa raises a hand and sings the skies open, lightning striking through their arms and legs. The lightning stays threaded through their bodies. Stiles moves next, casting one palm up and blowing ashes onto the wind, thick tree roots grasp and clamber their way up and into the bodies of the trapped people and pull apart. It’s dark magic. Brutal.  
  
‘Why?’ Lydia whispers.  
  
Jeremy looks unimpressed. ‘Who cares? They’re trying to kill us.’  
  
‘Jeremy,’ she says, ‘you don’t just _perform_ magic that dark for no reason.’  
  
‘What? They’ve done worse.’  
  
‘Not like _this._ You don’t use nature to kill. You let it take it’s own course.’  
  
‘I don’t understand.’  
  
Evelyn cuts in. ‘Nature is magic. Magic is death. Death is life. Life is nature.’

Lydia nods. ‘Magic is manipulating the natural order of things. Manipulating, _not_ controlling. Every time a witch acknowledges that they’re accepting a certain list of rules. The most important of which is _no fucking with Mother Nature._ ’  
  
‘That still doesn’t make sense.’  
  
Lydia makes a noise. ‘You can’t bring people back from the dead. Why? Because death is kind of nature’s shtick and she gets pissed off when you try and call take back. You can summon a hurricane and throw it at someone and you can set someone’s clothes on fire, that’s just changing the odds, but you cannot _divert something from it’s natural course._ What he did with the tree roots? Pretty close to human sacrifice in terms of _do nots._ Unless he grew himself a forest specifically for killing people with he basically just middle fingered the natural order of the universe.’    
  
‘Shit.’  
  
‘Why would he do it?’ Lydia says to herself more than to the others.  
  
Evelyn snorts. ‘He’s a psychopath?’  
  
‘He’s not.’ Most likely. ‘Louisa’s doing this on her own then.’  
  
Jeremy taps the side of his head. ‘Head, bomb.’

‘She’d let him blow her up before she’d let herself be controlled. I’m finishing this.’

She runs out into the fray before Evelyn or Jeremy can tell her it’s stupid. Before she can think it’s stupid. She has to get closer to the altar, within the last set of lines she drew on the ground before. It gets harder to move the closer she gets to the monolith, her shoes catch and begin to sink into the ground, she wrenches them up and shimmies in between the thick roots Stiles called up and the viscera strewn ground. A hand brushes all the way along her side as she tummy crawls until she’s behind the altar. She rolls away from the altar until she can lie on her stomach and peek around it.     

‘Are they dead?’ Stiles asks, hands flipping a small jagged cut of glass.

‘Yep,’ Louisa says, ‘why is the ritual still going? It should have stopped.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe- Shit, they didn’t kill her.’ His face splits into a smile, ‘we can do this _now._ ’

Louisa pales. ‘Fucking hell.’

Both of them turn and run for the altar pulling knives. Stiles hits the barrier first and goes hurtling back. Louisa changes approach but still gets knocked down. Stiles rolls onto his knees and says something in heavily accented Polish. His witches begin to chant. The girl on the altar screams and thrashes against her binds. Slow puddles of blood slip off, too much for one body, and as she screams the blood turns to wings. The wings split apart into fine thread curling up and around on the ground, sliding toward the chanting men. The thread forms into thick rope and crawls up the men’s bodies and sliding across their throats. The rope yanks upwards and in the sudden silence Lydia’s breathing seems especially loud. The silence holds for _five six seven_ heartbeats before erupting into wave after wave of never ending noise.  
  
Lydia puts her face to the earth as heavy drops of liquid slam into the ground. She doesn’t look up to see what it is. The thick slide of salt into her mouth and the stickiness that attaches leafs to her hand says she already knows.  
  
‘ _Did you think you could run?’_ A voice screams. ‘ _Did you think you could leave?_ ’  
  
Lydia jams a hand over her ear and crawls away. A hand yanks her off the ground, brings her face to face with Stiles, magic ringing his head like a halo, pulsing visibly against the dark.  
  
‘Lydia,’ Stiles says with a too deep voice that rips into her head. ‘Lydia what are you doing here?’  
  
Lydia stands up, starts closing the spell. She gets through one syllable, lets the next drag halfway out of her, then a hand _-Stiles-_ is clawing around her throat and holding her.  
  
‘No.’ He says, rancid breath reaching across her face, ‘sorry, but no.’  
  
Louisa’s eyes are dark ringed and she’s standing tight lipped with the girls head in her hands. She looks to Lydia and nods once. Then, very slowly, she crushes the skull in her hands.  
  
Lydia looks away. Stiles drops her and she lands on her knees.  
  
‘Louisa,’ Stiles voice is crackling, ‘what the fuck?’

‘I told you that if you made me choose between you and her you’d be surprised.’  
  
‘Congratulations, you’ve achieved.’ He spits, signalling to a few men behind him. ‘She’s still got air in her lungs, finish it.’  
  
‘No.’ Fire crackles over the butterfly wings, spreads in long streaks from the sky toward the rest of the girls’ body on the altar. Fire consumes it.  
  
‘I’d say ‘do you know what you’ve done’ but you do, and I try to stay away from villainous clichés.’  
  
Louisa scowls. ‘Not soon enough, anyway.’  
  
The pillars shake. Great white monoliths cracking right down the middle. They split and fall to the ground crashing as wave after wave of butterflies is released.    
  
All the butterflies turn as one and spiral towards her. She feels every beat of their wings and every scale. Dizziness falls over her and it feels like they’re eating alive, trying to bore through her skin. She pushes them out as best she can, hands flying around her face and throat, skimming the lines of her body. They try her mouth and she feels the second one gets it because it shatters on her tongue. Three more try, then six, then she loses count. All of them shatter the second they cross the threshold of her teeth.    
  
She screams, because what else can she do, and the butterflies stop. Leaving her and flying away, back to the broken pillar. The scales are clogging up her mouth. She pushes them off her tongue, gags, and lets her eyes water over with tears. A hand passes over her head. She pushes it away. When she feels collected enough she looks to the hand reaching for her, thick wrists, tattoos, fingers she knows.  
  
Scott looks like he’s never even seen her before and that’s when she knows that things are absolutely irrevocably fucked. He looks angry and scared and _hurt._

There’s a terrible light that comes across the clearing, tree’s springing up, the woods reclaiming the ground taken. Scott lets go and pushes her back and as she stumbles she turns and runs. She gets a few miles before Scott cuts her off. He pins her down against the cliff, right up against Beacon Hills most famous make out spot. His hands are bruising tight on her arms. ‘What were you doing there?’  
  
‘We thought we could-’  
  
‘Get rid of it? Jesus, Lydia, _you have no idea what it is._ ’

‘It wants to kill me. That’s enough.’  
  
‘So you just got there first?’  
  
‘Yes!’  
  
‘No!’ Scott yells. ‘Christ, we’ve been trying to get it to manifest on our terms. Convince it to be on our side.’  
  
‘At the cost of my life?’ She makes him look her in the eyes. _Because I’m worth less, because what happens to me doesn’t matter._  
  
‘I would never let it hurt you.’  
  
‘I didn’t need you to protect me!’  
  
‘Too bad, you’ve _got_ me.’ His face begins to lose human proportion flowing into the wolf. ‘You didn’t kill it. It’s hibernating, it’ll come back at the next moon twice as strong and we need it, okay, Lydia? We’re on the losing side right now. We need every weapon we can get our hands on.’ His grip on her loosens, he turns them so they’re forehead to forehead. ‘We called it here. We know what it is and how to get rid of it if we have to _._ No one is walking into this blind.’  
  
‘I am.’  
  
His eyes flash. ‘Lydia.’  
  
‘What is it about this _fucking_ town that makes everyone so crazy? You should have told me. You all should have told me right from the start.’  
  
‘You came back-’  
  
‘ _I’m not talking about now_!’ Her voice cracks with anger. ‘I’m human or I’m not. I’m something you think you need to protect or I’m someone that you love enough to let stand on her own. Either way I’m still strong enough to handle this and you should _tell_ me.’  
  
‘None of us wanted to hurt you.’

Oh, _fuck_ him _,_ he doesn’t even have the first _fucking clue_ what this feels like. This fucking helplessness, listlessness, like no matter how hard she paddles upstream the water is just getting rougher and full of all this shit she can’t fucking handle. ‘Oh, yeah, poor Lydia, _poor_ crazy Lydia, she can’t even hold a real job because the panic attacks make her unstable, can’t finish her degree, she’s so fucking sad and pitiful that she can’t even have a relationship. She brought back the devil, she ran away, she killed her boyfriend, she wasn’t strong enough to bring _him_ back-’ fuck fuck fucking fuck her fuck him fuck all this it’s killing her, it’s fucking _killing_ her. ‘Poor, sad, _stupid_ Lydia.’ The sad thing is that she knows how to cope with this. A pallet of foundation, a new outfit, a new equation. Change all the tiny details because the bigger ones are undefeatable. She can do this because she’s had to and it’s exactly that knowledge that is driving her crazy. The pain is _familiar._ Scott reaches out a hand, to help, to heal, because for him you can heal with love, and she flinches away from it, has to, he thinks he can _love_ her. ‘No. You don’t get to touch me.’ 

She runs, and that too is something familiar.  
\--

Jackson _dies_ because-

Jackson _is_ dead because-

Jackson, fucking Jackson, who managed to make her universe all about him, Jackson who managed to define her fears and her accomplishments without even trying, Jackson who is dead and still the stopping and starting point of her reality, Jackson who’s a spectre, but not, not ever, because he’s dead and it’s because she couldn’t love him enough to hold him to life-

He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s fucking _dead_ and he’s not coming back and half the time she hates herself for how much she thinks it should have been her. Fucking Jackson who tore her up inside and drowned her because he could. Fucking Jackson who ripped her story up and made her his fucking tragedy, still, ten fucking years on.


	6. Impasse (Or A Couple of Conversations Lydia Martin Does Not Want, and One Revelation She Needs)

\--

Act V – Impasse (Or A Couple of Conversations Lydia Martin Does Not Want, and One Revelation She Needs) 

\--

 

Lydia throws things into a bag barely registering what passes through her hands. Clothes and books and a perfume bottle with a crack on the side lie in her open suitcase daring her to shut it. Daring her to just get up and leave.

She tips all of it out again and sits on her bed; knee’s drawn up, and tries to drown out the blood rushing through her head. She spends hours sitting there feeling like she’s halfway between an inhale and an exhale. She hears the rusty noise of the opening elevator over the white noise. 

‘Lydia.’ Louisa says quietly, blood dripping off her hands.  
  
‘Stop,’ Lydia full body shudders, ‘I can’t be mad at you right now. I can’t. So we’re just -you saved my life and I’m going to think about that instead.’  
  
‘We should talk about this.’ Louisa lets out a small frustrated snarl. ‘ _Stiles_.’  
  
And so the devil is called, Stiles stalks out of the dark three seconds later, the air gaining the thickness of freshly turned soil. ‘What you did out there-’  
  
‘You,’ Lydia screams, sitting upright on the bed, ‘are a liar and a manipulator and if you think you’re getting this past me you’re a fucking idiot. You would have killed her. You would have killed _me_. Oh, and when you’re done bleeding on the floor get out of my room.’  
  
Stiles takes a deep breath, lies flicking across his face, ‘Lydia-’  
  
‘Do you think I don’t know how to kill a witch too?’ Lydia hisses.

Stiles blinks and shakes his head like he’s _sad._ Lydia doesn’t know how she stops herself from hitting him.

‘Leave,’ Louisa says quietly. Stiles does, although the scent of rot and soil lingers.

‘You don’t see him again.’ Lydia steps forward grabbing Louisa’s shoulders. ‘He’s on a fucking crusade Louisa, Jesus.’  
  
‘So is Allison.’  
  
‘Allison is not my best friend!’ Louisa flinches. ‘You don’t get to leave me. You don’t get to shut me out ‘for my own protection’ because that has _never protected me._ ’  
  
‘We can’t be neutral parties forever.’  
  
‘How about right now.’ Lydia says desperately, ‘why can’t I have right now?’  
  
‘Lydia.’ Louisa takes Lydia’s hands off her shoulders. ‘I can _not_ be a neutral party. You know what’s coming as well as I do. Do you think they built up Beacon Hills as a supernatural base for shits and giggles? That Allison came to help you just to _help?_ There is a Greek fucking god living in the spa uptown, the fates of _multiple pantheons_ have a _yarn superstore_ , and a few literal manifestations of chaos are living in the Hale house. I have set more wards and cast more dangerous, brutal, ugly, dark spells since we moved than I have soul enough to pay for. I am well aware that Stiles is leading a crusade that’s going to get a lot of us killed. I’m honestly still on the fence about whether or not it’s something worth dying for, but the fact is that the hunters are one small step away from snapping and mounting a genocide and they might not kill you but they will sure as hell kill me and everyone you love. The choice to not choose has a time limit, babe, and we are at just about the end of it.’  
  
‘Allison-’  
  
‘Is a spymaster and a good friend.’ For a certain definition of good, ‘she’s also the single most dangerous woman on the planet and the mother to a half werewolf kid. You can bet she stays up at night thinking about what either side of this war would do to the child of a Hale and an Argent. She won’t save us at the cost of her kid and you would never ask her to.’

‘I don’t want to live here.’ Lydia can feel the truth of it as she says it. ‘I don’t want to fight a war. I don’t war to be scared or helpless or someone’s pawn.’

‘You’re not.’ Louisa says soothingly, ‘but the world won’t stop so you can fight your demons. You have to choose.’

Lydia’s hands shake so hard she can’t even feel the tips. ‘Let’s go bake something.’

Louisa hangs her head. ‘Alright.’

Lydia bangs into the kitchen and pulls out everything she can reach; a huge bowl of stone fruit, lychees, reams of pastry, fish, avocadoes, beef bones, the end of a pasta bake. She doesn’t bother to sort them into flavours or meals just lays them on tables and whips around to the liquor cabinet. She doesn’t really register opening a bottle but she does remember the jarring hit of the glass on her teeth and the hot dry burn down her throat. She drinks too much. Slops it onto her shirt front. Instead of putting the bottle down she tugs the collar away from her throat, tries to feel past the material on her skin, tries to feel like she’s not drowning. She drinks more before putting the bottle down. Out on to the main table comes a heavy book and piles of chocolate and a day old sponge cake.

‘Tiramisu?’ Louisa says quietly. ‘We could try the one with the good vodka.’

Lydia nods too jerky. ‘Some other stuff too.’ _Can’t breathe, can’t think._  
  
Sure, she could deal with her relationship problems all of which she’s made all on her own for once. Or she could get smashed on expensive vodka and make tiramisu and white chocolate mousse with a coffee vodka syrup.    
  
‘Cinnamon pull aparts.’ She says to the bowl of fruit she was thinking of turning into jam. They could sell jam. Maybe jam could solve all their problems. She reaches for the fruit just as Louisa hip checks her towards the sponge she should be cutting up. Her hands are shaking when she lifts up the knife.  
  
‘Lydia,’ Louisa moves the fruit clear to the other side of the room, ‘you could just explain.’  
  
‘Or I could keep drinking.’  
  
‘Or you could _explain things._ ’ Louisa takes the really expensive vodka off her and hands her the stuff that smells like hells armpit. ‘You’re getting mope all over the place. If I wanted this I’d go to the Hale house.’ Lydia makes a curious noise, Louisa rolls her eyes. ‘Stiles political coup has been mistaken as a romantic overture, it’s all very Austen.’  
  
 _What coup?_ ‘I can see how they would mix the two up.’  
  
‘Fucking werewolves,’ Louisa says wonderingly, ‘now that we’ve come back to the relevant point, there is a werewolf you should maybe be talking to. I’m suggesting it. As a suggestion.’  
  
Lydia scrunches her nose. Her relationship with Scott is emotional in a way she’s never had before. If he was literally any other man she’d be able to be ruthless. She’d do what she had to to make herself safe. With Scott she gets stuck on his sadness and hurt. ‘Maybe we should visit Derek. If I can convince him first it doesn’t matter if I can’t convince Scott. We’ll have our vote of confidence.’ Then she takes another gulp of drink.  
  
‘That’s ruthless and pragmatic and if we hadn’t already agreed not to fuck I would stick my tongue in you.’ Louisa takes the bottle off Lydia again. ‘It does not solve any problems.’

They work in silence for a bit, the headiness of the alcohol rolling down Lydia’s body and settling in her hips and hands.

  
‘You’re going to keep helping him, right?’ Lydia asks. Louisa passes her a bowl of clarified butter.  
  
‘I would even if he hadn’t had me make several nasty blood promises.’ Louisa sighs, ‘very thorough of him, really.’

Lydia drinks more. She cooks until her hands ache and the kitchen is a disaster zone. Louisa leaves with a worried glance and a shoulder pat. Lydia doesn’t acknowledge her. One of the regulars’ kids is having a birthday next week; she makes him a cake complete with decorated candles. It turns out lopsided and tasting a little too much like baking soda. The icing is orange and bright sickening green.

It doesn’t make any more mess than anything else when she smashes it between her fingers, the icing lands all over, the cake crumbles. She digs out one of the candles and tries to think of some sort of wish as she lights.

‘I wish-’ her breath rattles too quickly, the whole world slamming down on her head, ‘I wish you hadn’t died you asshole. I wish-’

The candle goes out. Just her luck.

\--  
  
She does open on her own. Maybe people know or maybe her luck isn’t a complete crapshoot but no more than two dozen people walk in for the first three hours, all easy orders. Louisa comes down at midday, dressed in tight black with sensible shoes, bags Lydia knows contain bones and blood hanging from her belt. Louisa leaves without Lydia so much as saying a word.

Most of the day passes quietly and smoothly. Lydia’s skin resettles just enough for her the constant tightness in her shoulders to ease. Five minutes before closing the door opens. Lydia doesn’t look up from the book she’s trying to read. ‘Last call.’

‘Bit earlier closing time than usual,’ Peter makes a pleasant expression. ‘Black. To go.’

The hyper aware feeling comes back three fold and it’s like nothing will ever be good again. He’s here. He’s _here._ In her _home._ She makes the coffee twice, spills the first one on her shoes. Peter makes a _tsk_ noise under his breath.  
  
She slams the cup down. ‘What do I owe you?’  
  
‘Lydia, you’ll never owe me a thing.’ He says with mock astonishment.  
  
‘I’d rather not have any dirt on my hands when it comes to you.’  
  
‘Dirt is so much more fun though,’ he pushes up right against the counter so they’re bare inches apart, ‘I don’t want to be even with you.’  
  
Her words get stuck. She has to say something now; she can’t give him the upper hand. ‘I-’  
  
‘Thank you,’ Peter says with a smile, ‘for saving me.’  
  
It feels like the universe has been dug out from under her ribs. ‘I did it to save myself.’  
  
‘Oh, I know,’ Peter sounds like he’s placating her, ‘but saving yourself very often means saving me. We’re very similar.’  
  
She thinks _I’d kill you_ and then _you’d kill me_ and then _we cannot be the same I refuse to live in a world where we are the same._  
  
‘I have a heart.’  
  
‘I did too once. Dreadful thing, really.’ He says with a laugh. He takes his coffee and leaves, taking what little strength she had left with him.  
  
\--  
  
Scott doesn’t pick up when she calls, she knows that as far as he’s concerned she endangered him and Stiles for what he will think are selfish reasons. She thinks for a long time about calling Derek but the story has too much Allison in it and she’s not ready to go there yet. It’s sad to realise your phonebook only has maybe 12 contacts.  
  
For the first twelve days after Jackson died she was never more than three feet away from Danny, at least emotionally speaking. He was the only person in the entire world who would listen to her cry, who was close enough to get a comment about the pool in spring or the leather in the back of his car or the ticklish spot on his ribs. It wasn’t with the same intimacy but it was enough for her to say his name and have someone make the same face as hers. A mirror.  
  
She wants that back. Scott is gone and Louisa is slipping away. Allison is transitional at best, always running with her war a step behind. Lydia is a star with light years of distance. She is a solar system with no orbits and gravitational pull. There is nothing but space, and if she’s this alone she might as well be buried. Danny never left a forwarding address, just an email and a soft kiss to her forehead. The message being that he loves her but he can’t deal with her and he has to go. She doesn’t begrudge him that. Any other day she wouldn’t even think too. Still, it takes less than a half hour to track him down.  
  
She gets in the car. She drives.  
  
\--  
  
The house is tall and buttery and looks like it smells like sugar and freshly cut grass. Lydia feels offended by it’s very existence. She lurks in her car for twenty minutes before the sheer ordinariness really digs in under her knees. Danny in a small town in a normal place with a doctor boyfriend and her with an ugly pick up truck and heavy ugly boots and hair that needs a really good wash.  
  
‘Danny,’ she says impatiently, the nice woman across the road is staring and Lydia isn’t sure she’s blinked at all, ‘this is a nice small town in Iowa and you’re shacking up with a doctor. If I have entered into some sort of supernaturally inclined alternate universe please tell me now.’  
  
Danny blinks. ‘Would you like some coffee?’  
  
‘God fucking please.’ She pushes past him into the soft pale yellow hallway that thins out into an open plan living space. Danny leads her to a floating island covered in small ceramic fruits and small porcelain dolls. No matter where she looks the dead eyes of little bo peep stare back hungrily at her.  
  
Danny come in behind her, claps a hand on her shoulder as he passes. ‘Daniel will be home soon.’  
  
‘You’re dating a guy called Daniel? Daniel and Daniel.’  
  
Danny shrugs, all _what can you do?_ ‘It’s somewhat narcissistic, sexually speaking.’  
  
‘I bet,’ she eyes the candy pink and purple porcelain shepherdess sitting on the microwave ‘problems?’  
  
Danny raises an eyebrow as he mixes her coffee, ‘no why?’  
  
‘I’m hoping the creepy dolls are a part of some insane protection ritual.’  
  
‘Nope. I like them.’  
  
She lets her eyebrows convey what she thinks of that. The house is warm and open, a little niche of normal. Though, from his clothes and the lived in feel of the chairs, normal might just be _normal_ for Danny. She’s both wildly jealous and pitying of that.  
  
‘Why are you here.’  
  
‘Boy trouble.’  
  
‘Ah huh,’ Danny raises a mocking eyebrow, ‘which boy, Louisa says there’s a club.’  
  
‘Murderous cult, inevitable hunter vs supernatural war, I’m sleeping with Scott McCall,’ Danny actually raises an eyebrow at the last one, ‘it’s a long story.’  
  
‘And what we don’t have is time.’  
  
She opens her mouth to cut him down and finds that the soft ticking of the clock falls into the rhythm of her breathing. Takes a breath. The truth is butting against her teeth. She tells him from the beginning, way back in her illegal bakery, way back when Beacon Hills was a place to wake up from not go to sleep in. She drags it all up and bares it.  
  
‘That’s,’ he takes a harsh gulp of coffee, ‘that’s something. Fucking hell Lydia.’  
  
‘I know.’  
  
‘It would have been faster to just cut off a fucking arm.’  
  
‘I know.’  
  
‘So instead of dealing you came here to, what, ask my opinion?’  
  
‘You’re angry.’  
  
‘Lydia, I cannot deal with this.’  
  
‘You’re my friend.’ She says with a small, tinny voice. This is her ace in the hole, her final card.    
  
‘I know and I’m very sorry but I cannot go back.’  
  
‘I’m not asking you to, I just want to stop for awhile.’ Lydia says. ‘I’m so tired.’  
  
Danny opens his mouth to speak and shuts it again. ‘It won’t just go away if you apply some make up.’  
  
Down with one punch, Jesus, Danny.

She presses her nails together and tries to draw enough energy together to think. What can she say? ‘I lit a candle for him the other night.’  
  
‘ _Lydia_ ,’  
  
‘What, am I just meant to move on? I- I- saved him, I _loved_ him and that saved him and then he died anyway. Am I just meant to move on knowing that maybe whatever I have isn’t good enough, that I’m not -how can you just _move on?_ ’  
  
‘Because loving him was never an obligation for me.’ Danny says sternly. ‘You haven’t been loving him, Lydia, you’ve been mourning him and the girl you used to think you were. Jackson’s dead. Really dead. And it doesn’t matter that you have a key to his house. It doesn’t matter that he carried you across a lacrosse field bloody and broken. It doesn’t matter that you’re the only person he ever told about his parents. What matters is that he’s dead, you are not, and while there were a lot of things he was an utter bastard about I can feel pretty secure in saying that he never would have wanted this for you. No one wants this for you. It has been years Lydia, lay your broken heart to rest.’  
  
‘If I can’t?’  
  
‘Then, god, I don’t know _._ You keep running into walls and painting yourself into corners and you never get off the ground of that fucking lacrosse field. Not really.’  
  
Hope kindles. ‘I want to, I want to get up.’  
  
‘There isn’t a secret. There aren’t some magical words that will make it better. You can keep putting on your make up and doing just enough to get by,’ her face crumbles a little, he makes it sound bad, awful. He grabs one of her hands. ‘And that’s fine. It’s perfectly okay to _never be okay._ It doesn’t make you less and it sure as hell doesn’t make you weak. You can survive, you will, and no one can take that from you.’  
  
‘I don’t think this was a pep talk.’  
  
‘What would we do with pep?’ Danny says. ‘I have some store bought muffins.’  
  
She smiles fondly into her coffee, ‘asshole.’  
  
\--  
  
Daniel is tall and broad and so nice she keeps checking for wires. He asks if she wants something every three seconds, he has to be a robot. Danny says he’s nervous about meeting The Lydia Martin who single handily controlled their high school through manipulation and lip gloss. She’s seen herself in the mirror lately, hair too long, a dress that exposes her bruised up knees and shoes that are practical before they are beautiful. She is not intimidating.     
  
Daniel takes her on a long walk through the dead hospital at midnight and she sees why Danny likes him so much. They’re both morbid as fuck. Daniel drags her from room to room and talks about his patients and his hopes and how he’s certain there’s a ghoul in the maternity ward and would she like to see?  
  
They linger on the roof with the night sky of two am sparkling above. Daniel smokes. They all pretend Danny doesn’t know. ‘People die.’ She says.  
  
‘Yep.’  
  
‘And sometimes it’s your fault.’  
  
Daniel laughs. ‘Wrong, sometimes the fates conspire against us.’  
  
The fates that re-sell bad quality cashmere for exorbitant prices. ‘Predestination? From a doctor?’  
  
‘Does that surprise you?’  
  
‘As much as I can be surprised.’  
  
‘You talk like you’re a hundred.’  
  
‘Maybe I have an excellent plastic surgeon.’  
  
‘Maybe you’re full of shit.’  
  
Lydia startles. ‘Excuse me?’  
  
‘Danny doesn’t want to talk about the supe cesspool you hail from. He gets scared sometimes. Can’t say I like that. He hasn’t been home in years. He doesn’t cope a lot.’ Daniel looks at the ground like he wants to kill it just for being there. What little part of Lydia that was waiting to find Daniel a poor match for Danny shrivels up and dies.    
  
‘You have some magical words, then?’  
  
‘I lost someone a week ago. That’s why I came home early the day you got here.’ He shrugs, tense shoulders making the movement sharp. ‘Shit happens.’  
  
She snorts. ‘Profound.’  
  
Daniel laughs. ‘I’ll tell you what I told Danny the first night he woke up screaming, the world is not mystical or mundane, or beautiful or evil. It doesn’t owe you love or sacrifice or hope or despair. Life, frankly, owes you shit fucking all. Sometimes you drop your ice cream in a mud puddle. Sometimes you accidentally stalk the love of your life for four weeks in increasingly creepy ways. Sometimes you lose a baseball match. Sometimes you get pregnant just when you want to. I lost a patient a week ago and I will beat myself up about it until I have saved a thousand more and tipped some cosmic scale back to where it should be. Even though that’s probably not healthy. One night I will smoke an entire packet of cigarettes and think about some horrible things. I believe that there’s nothing I can do to change my path and that I should just make the most of what I have. Sometimes,’ he says solemnly, eyes on a twinkling star, ‘ _shit happens_ and because _shit happens_ the only shit that really matters is the shit we do ourselves _._ ’  
  
The star is bright and very far away. There’s a warmth in her chest that grows tighter and tighter the longer she looks. She’s not sure what he means, not yet. Mostly she thinks it must be nice to be so certain of things.    
  
\--  
  
She fixes a fence with Daniel and bakes a pie with Danny, and has three days of so normal she could cry. She can’t tell if it’s peaceful or irritating which is the main reason she decides to turn her ugly pick up around and go back taking the very, very scenic route back to Beacon Hills. It’s near a month to the day she left that she turns up on Derek’s doorstep.    
  
‘I’m sorry.’ She says before he gets the door all the way open.  
  
Derek waits a moment, his hair mussed and his pants on back to front. ‘Wrong werewolf.’  
  
A sudden burst of irrational anger sweeps her. She’s being _nice_ he should appreciate that. ‘Well, that was almost helpful, I’m glad the therapy is working for you.’  
  
‘Weak attempt.’ Derek waits a moment. ‘Lydia?’

With a sudden bolt of clarity Lydia finds herself willing to be honest. _Wanting_ to be honest.

‘I loved him and he died.’  She says before the feeling fades. ‘What the fuck do I do with that?’  
  
Derek, to his credit, barely looks taken aback. ‘I loved her and she set my family on fire. You get up and you keep going.’  
  
But it _has_ to be more than that. ‘That’s not fair.’  
  
‘Shit happens, you learn, even if it takes awhile.’ Derek rubs his face. ‘You keep asking the same question.’  
  
Lydia waits for the panic. Waits and waits and waits to fall again. ‘No one’s given me an answer.’  
  
‘’Cause they can’t answer that question,’ Derek says simply, ‘wanna a beer? You can make fun of the Johnson treaty.’  
  
One bridge rebuilt, an entire town to go.  
  
\--  
  
When she gets home she lies on the floor of her bedroom. Her fort is still up and the claustrophobic light is creeping across her skin. It doesn’t feel like it did the first time -mesmerising and purifying- but it doesn’t feel like the heaviness of last time. She looks at the numbers swirled on the walls. She can pick out constellations in her work, her own math, rhythms and points that dance like the night sky does. For the first time in years she sits up, she grabs a book and a pen, and begins to write out a new universe.


	7. find the words you can trust

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> its done i finished it i did it i finished the thing 
> 
> here is the [soundtrack for the thing](http://8tracks.com/sazzafraz/the-weight-of-living)

\--

Part VI - Find the Words You Can Trust

\--

She doesn’t want to talk to Scott  
  
She _does_ want to talk to Scott  
  
‘Motherfucker,’ she hisses to herself and tries to push her pick up out of a muddy ditch. There was _meant_ to be an organic meat market in town today but BayLaurel shut it down. Not soon enough to have saved Lydia the trip but just long enough for her to get caught in the rain and slide right off the road into a ditch. She even took the morning off to go.  
  
‘Need some help?’  
  
‘Isaac,’ who is currently suffering from a few burnt off bald patches and thick facial scaring, ‘nice hair.’  
  
‘Stiles was pretty pissed at me for telling you about the spell.’ Isaac rolls up the sleeves of his expensive work shirt. There are thick burns on his forearms. ‘I told you they wouldn’t get it.’  
  
‘I see.’  
  
Isaac smiles. ‘Scott was pissed too.’  
  
‘I can’t imagine,’ she says purposefully dispassionate, ‘you going to help me?’  
  
They push together and the car makes a little headway before slipping back into ditch. Isaac swears. ‘I guess I’m not much of it. Peter’s heading to your place.’  
  
‘Why?’  
  
‘Permits.’ He says darkly.  
  
‘I see.’  
  
Isaac pushes her away from the car, mutters something in Irish, and then simply pushes the car. He leans down immediately and sticks his hands in the ditch water. Before his hands enter the water Lydia see’s bloody welts everywhere his hands pressed against the car. ‘You picked up the book I told you about yet?’  
  
‘No. I haven’t. Been kind of busy.’ Her eyes widen. ‘He sent you out here to watch me.’  
  
Isaac grins. ‘Yes, he did.’  
  
Lydia spends thirty seconds being pissed before cycling through to pleased. Not that Isaac or Scott get to know that. ‘I hope you can keep up.’

Isaac rolls his shoulders and gives her a toothy grin. ‘I’ll cope.’

She races Isaac through Beacon Hills back to her home. He probably doesn’t think of it that way. At least not until she forces him into the side of a van with a sharp turn. She wins.

Isaac sticks his tongue out and flounces off once she’s turning the key of her front door.

‘Really?’ she says to Scott sitting on the floor behind her counter,‘again.’

His eyes open to red slits. ‘Welcoming committee.’

‘I didn’t do anything wrong.’ Lydia says, ‘I refuse to apologize for not wanting to be ritually sacrificed.’

Scott’s face goes through an array of expressions, most of them negative, ‘we’ll agree to disagree.’

‘No, we won’t, I’m right.’ Lydia sticks her chin up which is apparently the line for Scott.

Suddenly her back is against the counter, Scott’s hands climbing up and down her body. His mouth is at her neck, down to her breasts, shirt rucked up for skin on skin contact. He’s gone for a second and then back again, shirt off, eyes too bright, stubble scratching the skin all along her throat. He bites below her ear and she moans, a little _too_ wantonly before pulling it together. ‘Scott-’

‘This is a war zone Lydia,’ he sighs into the curve of her ear, ‘and you just left. Do you have any- any _idea_ -’

She did, is the thing, so she lets him put his hands over the curve of her ass, the lines of her back because she did leave and she did come back. He makes a pained noise and drops his arms so she’s taking his weight. ‘I do this a lot don’t I?’

Lydia relaxes, ‘what, corner me and make me say things I don’t want to? Or putting your hands down my pants? You’re not going to apologise for either.’

‘No,’ he says petulantly, ‘I have to leave again.’

Lydia sighs, ‘I wasn’t kidding. If you think I can’t protect myself you walk away.’

Scott’s shoulders bunch and relax, bunch, relax. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Neither do I.’ Lydia whispers.

Scott trails kisses from the bridge of her nose to the curve of her ear. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘No,’ she leans back until they can see eye to eye, ‘you’re not.’

She tries to make it sound like she understands. She does. She knows where she is, she knows who he is, she knows what he’s fighting for. She does understand she just doesn’t agree. It mustn’t translate, though, because Scott’s eyes are tired and accepting. ‘I love you, for what that’s worth.’

‘I love you, too.’ She says back. ‘It- it might be worth something.’

Scott smiles and nods, hugs her once and leaves. She stands there leaning against the wall. God she wants a cigarette. Isaac reappears with a cheery hullo having changed into a new ice green shirt. He sniffs the air and rubs his nose.  

‘Boo,’ he says, ‘now what do I tell the betting pool.’

Lydia punches him lightly on the arm.

\--

Peter walks in, simply, calmly. He’s smiling to himself as he greets and talks to a pregnant lady. If she didn’t know him as intimately as she does she’d miss the flinch of his hands on his belly. Like he wants claws. The mother doesn’t miss it, though. Peter’s smile grows dazzling when he meets her eyes. Lydia waits for it, the fear, the anxiety, and finds that even after the eye contact has gone on too long for casual that she is still waiting for any reaction. Nothing comes. 

‘The usual.’ Peter says, like he has one.

Lydia smiles, ‘of course,’

There used to be a lot of fear in her but she knows now what she didn’t before; she knows that she can run, she can run far, but she can also come back home.  
  
She yanks a few hairs out and makes Peter his coffee.  
  
‘How’s your day.’

It’s simple, so simple, she drops a strand of hair in, she turns the spoon in the tea cup three times, she whispers for protection and listens to the hum as the universe provides.

Peter’s first gulp is long and deliberately showy. His second is stilted. The third is a choke swiftly accompanied by the smash of porcelain on the floor. Peter’s knee’s hit the ground mere seconds after.  
  
‘This is weak and powerless.’ Lydia leans over the counter. ‘This is something you will never make me again.’    
  
‘Reverse it.’  
  
‘Not yet. This is my house, my rules, my game, you’re only playing because I _let_ you.’  
  
‘No.’ He says.  
  
‘Yes. You’re nothing without me, _my dear_ ,’ no one knows better than she does how this kind of loss can cripple you. Half from herself and half from the intimate leftovers Peter left inside her. She knows that grief is as much his motivation as it is the thing that’s choking her. Knows that it would take two names said out loud to truly murder him. Peter’s pathetic, which is a thought she hasn’t even had the capacity to hold until very recently; he’s easy and prey-like, just wearing excellent coverage. Lydia’s not, anymore. She’s always had a capacity for cruelty. Survival instincts say she shouldn’t pity the predator, but in her head she’s just hearing Daniel’s voice saying _shit happens._ It’s true. It does. They’re both by-products. That’s their shared weakness. Unfortunately for Peter it is _still a weakness._ ‘I know her name. It’s your guess which _her_ I’m talking about. It’s _you_ in my head, remember? You’re not a big man, Peter. I guess we are similar and we are different. I had my heart ripped out and I got scared. I ran. But I changed, I grew, and that’s something you can’t do you poor, burnt, _useless_ thing. I know the rules and I’ll play to them but you should remember that no one knows you like I know you and no one will _destroy you_ the way I can. I want my peace. I want my family. I want you eternally burning in a hell you can’t crawl out of but I’ll accept a life in which you know _I know_ what you really are.’ He said they were the same, they’re not. Lydia is sure she’s got a heart. Lydia is sure she’s got a soul. ‘And that’s not very much at all.  
  
‘Now, _you’re_ going to help _me_.’  
  
‘Doing what?’  
  
‘Oh.’ Lydia twirls a curl over a finger, let’s it go. ‘God killing.’  
  
\--

Peter is docile enough as she drives them over to the fruit market just outside town very early the next morning. He’s dressed for work in a sharp suit. He’s been looking down his nose at her clothes since he got in the car. Lydia, having planned this, is comfortable enough in her printed dress and walking shoes. The fifteen minutes of awkwardness is absolutely worth the look of disgust Peter gives the open air market. She stops the car and pulls out a shopping list.

‘Is this a joke?’ Peter hisses, ‘I have a _job._ ’

‘From now until the moment I’m done with you the only thing you _have_ to do is what I say.’

Peter snarls. ‘Bitch.’

‘Pathetic.’ She says back, ‘all of that showmanship and you come back with _bitch._ ’

Peter rips the list out of her hand and stomps put of the car. He walks into one of the butchers, the one she’s sure is part fae, and the man leans down so he can spit right in Peter’s face. Poor dear.

Lydia is much calmer getting out. First it’s to the little Greek pastry stand for a bag of fried something covered in syrup. Then to talk to the man who supplies her flour. The new bread flour is a little too rough for her taste. She slowly works her way through the market, greeting people and talking to other shop owners for the better part of an hour. She gets into a non verbal fight at the fresh yogurt place over a tub of unsweetened yogurt. She emerges victorious and takes a few soft cheeses for her trouble.   

‘Nicely done Ms Martin.’ Says a sweet voiced woman as she crosses over to the herbal stall. The woman is warm skinned and full lipped, long curled hair falling to below her waist. She has two bouquets of flowers in her arms. The body is not familiar but the voice is.

‘Ms’ Lydia pauses, ‘uh.’

‘Kora will do.’ She says kindly. ‘That’s a lot of food.’

Lydia nods. ‘I’ll need it.’

‘You will.’ Kora smiles. The flowers in her arms unfurl. ‘If you want to be heavy handed I know that Tom’s Fruits has a bowl of very delicious golden apples. Lovely for a pie.’

‘I already got some.’

‘What will you make for our dinner? None of us have any allergies, though my partner does prefer preserved meats. Who _knows_ why.’

‘Lydia-’ Peter says as he comes up behind Kora. He stops when he recognises her, eyes blowing wide. ‘My lady.’

To Lydia’s surprise Peter immediately folds into a graceful bow.

‘Am I?’ She says amusedly. ‘Perhaps. Why are you with Lydia, Mr Hale?’

‘She needs my assistance.’

Kora’s smile loses all its warmth. ‘I hope your assistance is given in good faith.’

‘It always is.’

‘Your mothers partner, what was her name?’ Kora plucks one of the flowers from its bouquet and snaps its stem over her fingers. ‘Ah, Mother Dread. Tacky. Where is she now?’

‘Dead.’ Peter says flatly.

‘And kept.’ Kora says almost airily, ‘we _keep._ ’

Kora walks off, throwing the broken flower on the ground.

‘She hates you,’ Lydia marvels, ‘that’s really beautiful.’

\--

Louisa is sitting open legged on the front step when they get back.

‘Ladylike.’ Peter says.

Louisa smiles wide and toothily and makes a production of rising to her feet. She’s dressed for magic again in thin black clothes and an assortment of knives. A bright blue flash of fire sweeps over her, producing a heat wave that lingers for a few moments. Peter doesn’t flinch.  Louisa tilts her head and starts to steadily pump out power. She stops after a moment and shakes her head. ‘It’s been a bad few months Hale. I don’t need to prove myself to you.’

Peter raises an eyebrow. ‘Prove yourself?’

Louisa looks at him with a blank ferocity Lydia has never seen before. ‘You’ve caused no end of trouble. Whatever you do tonight, babe, I hope it involves hurting him really badly.’

Louisa hugs her hard, the smoke smell of her dampened by fresh soil. Sadness. Lydia sighs into the embrace. ‘I hope whatever you do involves gross violence and mayhem.’

‘Stay safe.’

‘You too.’

Louisa leaves with a twirling knife in hand. If Lydia loved her less she wouldn’t see the too thin shape of her thighs and the momentary sag of her step every time she lifts a foot off the ground.  

‘They need him.’ Peter says chidingly.  
  
‘They need its power.’ Lydia says.  
  
‘Are you really going to make me run around this circle with you?’ Peter clucks his tongue, ‘we both now that your boy will lose.’  
  
‘I won’t.’ She says decisively. ‘I’m immune. You used me to cheat death. I’m pretty sure mother nature didn’t appreciate that much.’

Peter follows her through to the kitchen. He leans against one of the long benches, hip cocked and arms folded. She ignores him.

She arranges her prep area the way an army would arrange its battle maps. Each knife and each bowl sit in the exact right place. New knives shined and sharpened on silicone coated boards. Red for meat. Green for vegetables. Yellow and light green for fruit. A huge metal dish for the scraps.

She pulls a mixing bowl with already sifted flour in it, cracks an egg and adds the yolk. She taps the light green board sitting to Peter’s left. ‘Dice the tomatoes please.’

Peter holds up a bag of full ripe tomatoes so newly picked she can smell them from across the table. ‘These come in a can.’

‘You used me.’ She says again. ‘Dice the tomatoes.'

‘I came back weaker than intended. It was fixable.’  
  
‘For you. It made me barren.’ She pours in a heavy dose of cream. ‘Immune, in other words.’  
  
Finally, _finally,_ he picks up the knife. ‘You can’t sustain magic within yourself.’  
  
‘Theoretically speaking, there’s nothing wrong with the plumbing. _Theoretically_ , I still have the space. All the potential sealed up inside a bottle with a stopper we can’t take off.’ Peter puts the tomatoes aside and reaches for a pile of chocolate. ‘Cut that finely.’      
  
‘That won’t help.’ Peter starts to chop the chocolate unevenly. Lydia taps her wooden spoon on his hand and mimes doing it evenly. He does with a grunt of complaint. ‘You can’t _use_ the power. It would be a waste.’  
  
‘You know about the wards on the Hale house,’ she hedges.

‘Hmm, the one’s your friend made.’

‘Do you know how wards _work?_ ’

Peter makes a sour face.

She takes the more evenly diced chocolate and begins to warm it up in a glass bowl over some water. ‘Wards work by pulling energy directly out of a ley line. The main problem with ley lines is that there’s a minimum level of constant ‘off loading’ -basically free energy- that floats around and drives magic users up the wall. For the tessellated grids you have to keep your power source on the actually grid for it to function. The way it’s formatted means that while it’s in use all energy in it is used to its maximum potential, there’s no waste.’

Peter looks surprised. ‘A witch came up with that?’

‘Yes, tessellated wards can only go on buildings where there’s likely to be a constant presence of people because the wards are so finely tuned to the hearth of the house it literally draws power from the minor everyday vibrations just living would make. It also has an accelerated rate of decay. Normal ward’s decay in a 100,000,000,000,000th of the lifetime of the ley line they’re attached to, they’re self regulating and don’t need to be maintained. A ward can be dormant for sixty years and spring back to life in a few minutes. They’re resilient. Tessellated wards decay almost as soon as they begin to function unless a minimum amount of energy is constantly pumped into it.’

‘So you have someone stay on it constantly to maintain the baseline.’

‘Yes, but the problem with tessellated wards when you don’t have that is that they leak.’ Peter raises an eyebrow. Lydia sighs, stepping away from the food, pulling up the hem of her dress to show the thick inked lines on her stomach, curling around her thighs, dripping down to her toes. Stars, an entire universe inked between her heart and her feet, pulsing with intent, ‘and not only does it leak, it leaks in tremendous bursts of power. Before you used me I had a lot of magical potential, now I just have the hole where it should all go. I can use the power from the wards to summon the Danaus and then we chop off its head and take all it’s power.’  
  
Peter smiles and lifts his knife to the apples and pomegranates. ‘That’s dangerous information to give me.’  
  
Lydia rolls her shoulders and ‘Maybe, if we both didn’t know the three names left in that dead thing inside your chest.’  
  
‘I made a mistake with you.’ Peter smiles, all she can see are the tired lines of age around his mouth, sagging the skin at his nose. Old, tired, pitiable. ‘You turned out even better than I thought.’  
  
Lydia snorts. ‘You know, you really did use to scare me.’  
  
\--  
  
She sends Peter home with a flick of her fingers and sets about cooking.  
  
It may have been a means to an end when she started but in the intervening years it’s become the only thing she truly loves doing. She could get up and bake bread every day for the rest of her life without worrying. There are people here who come every week without fail to buy what she’s made with her own two hands. It’s not math, not anything expected from her and probably not what anyone wanted, but it’s what happened.

As the sun settles low in the Beacon Hills horizon Lydia packs the food into picnic baskets and goes out into the woods. The third time finding where the monolith had been is easiest. The trees twist out of her way and lead her patiently to the no longer clear patch of the woods. The marks of the ceremony are still obvious in the trees themselves, two of them twist up together in a mocking pastiche. Peter is waiting underneath the trees.

‘You’re late.’ He says.

‘You mean people don’t _rush_ to spend time alone with you?’ Lydia indicates the car. 'Go get the baskets.'

‘I’m not your dog.’

Oh, what words to choose, ‘are you sure?’

His face goes white and blotchy. ‘Don’t you dare-’

‘Hurt you? Use you?’ Lydia smiles, ‘Make you do something you don’t want to? Who has the power here; you or me? Who knows their names?’

‘You don’t know what I am, little girl. Did you think I would just do what you said? Death couldn’t stop me. _You_ couldn’t stop me.’ Peter snarls. The smell of death dirt, dirt mixed with dead body, rolls over her. Peter only knows a few bits of cruel magic, some taught to him, and some gleamed from Stiles’ mother. He calls it now and floods the space between them with an oppressive nothingness. The blackness presses on her lungs and she knows she only has a single chance to make what she says count. ‘The ones closest to you are the ones holding you back the most. Which one of them is it? Talia, your sister who was always a step ahead, always just out of your needy little reach. Was it Alia with her fragile hands, did you like slitting her throat? Did it make you feel bigger? Mieczyslawa the only woman who could ever understand you, but she didn’t want you, did she? She chose her _son_. You never won that fight, did you? What part of _I am not afraid of you_ was too hard to grasp. You gave me everything I needed to make sure everything you did haunts you forever. I know their voices, their scents, their favourite foods. I will haunt you. No one knows better than I do how hard that is to live with.’

The blackness presses hard, her ribs buckle. Time for the clincher. ‘And I’m the only one who remembers their favourite songs, what they hated about movies, what they _did_ love about you.’

‘Those you love will hold you back the most.’ Peter looks down and away, the blackness dissipating into the cool still night. ‘Of all the women I’ve known you have been the most surprising.’

He turns sharply towards the car.

Lydia runs a hand gingerly over her cracked ribs. Peter’s more complex than people give him credit for, her entire performance was based on that, for the time being she’s a few steps ahead. One day, very soon, they’ll have to sort it out properly. Tonight she just needs his obedience.  Lydia gets a few old white linen clothes and lays them out on the ground in the thin empty space between the trees.    

Peter’s good about setting out the food in the way she specifies and doesn’t protest when she asks him to sit in an old camping chair on the long side of the makeshift table. ‘I’m the bait.’  
  
‘Why would you expect something else?’ She tightens a bib with _maybe I ate your dingo_ printed on it around his neck. ‘We’ve got five minutes or so.’  
  
‘Offering me a final meal?’  
  
She rolls her eyes and sets out two other chairs at opposite ends of the cloth from each other. She sits down heavily in the chair facing the tree.

He nods towards a metal bowl filled with beef mince and pomegranate. ‘This is bloody.’

‘Some species of butterflies regularly drink blood and eat meat.’ She shrugs, ‘I thought the intestines would bother you more.’

Peter grunts and sits back in his chair. Lydia laughs with genuine mirth and sets her shoulders for what needs to be done.

‘Welcome.’ She says it again in latin, gaelic, every language she’s had to pick up, ‘let’s talk shop.’  
  
There’s nothing for a long time. Then all at once, a feeling floods from the bottom of her nerve endings, fills her stomach, explodes into a thousand stars at once sown tight underneath her skin. Her mind fills with unimaginable light and then snaps into darkness.

First it appears as a man hunched over in dirty rags, then as a child with its hair aflame, and lastly as a woman sobbing at her reflection in a mirror. The images coalesce and fold onto one another until she’s looking at a replica of herself, aged 15, her hair like it was when Peter mutilated her but her shoes the same soft worn in boots she was wearing the day Jackson died. A table forms from the ground, her chair turns into a glistening off white construct of butterfly and bone, Peter’s too ashes and thick wriggling worms, the last chair blends into the tree behind it. Peter’s mouth tilts back with a thick cracking noise and his mouth opens. She can’t hear him scream. She looks back at the thing at the end of the table.

‘Hello,’ it says, tinny voiced, ‘you’re Lydia.’

It sits down at the table, stopping to give Peter a reassuring pat on the knee, he continues to scream wordlessly. It looks around the table, poking things, tasting them, rearranging the silverware the way an overexcited guest would.

‘You’re,’ Lydia searches for a word, ‘here.’

‘I am,’ the woods echo with it’s voice _I am, I am, I am,_ ‘you called.’

Right. Show time. ‘I have something to ask of you.’

It’s mesmerizing to watch the twist of her own face. ‘War. That is all you have ever asked of me.’

‘Change is what we ask of you.’ Lydia licks her lips and lifts her chin defiantly, ‘revolution.’

‘Transformation.’ It says, ‘is not a simple process of making one thing into another. You understand this. You have to with your strange body.’

Lydia says nothing. After a moment it lifts its fork and reaches over to the raw meat and pomegranates, lifting a huge spoonful of the mixture and dumping it on a plate. Next it reaches for the salad, and then the duck, and then pours itself a glass of milk. It piles the food into its mouth, slopping it onto it’s dress and the floor. It chews open mouthed and swallows audibly.

It raises an eyebrow, ‘you won’t eat?’

‘The food of the gods-’

‘Ah,’ It wags a finger, ‘that is not your line, not here; we are none of us gods at this table.’

Lydia closes her mouth.

‘Do you remember what you were before this?’

‘Before what?’ Lydia asks, she glances at Peter, still hollow eyed and open jawed, and wonders if she might have bitten off more than she can chew.

‘Before the boy, before all the boys.’ It waves a hand. ‘You’re life, it seems, is entirely about boys.’

‘No.’ And it’s true when she says it. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You will.’ It says. ‘First: a riddle.’

Lydia nods, folds her hands in her lap, holds her head up.

‘Protection from what?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘You call out all the time for protection, from what, the monsters? You’re plenty monstrous and fearless despite your best efforts. What do you fear?’

‘That’s not a riddle.’ She says stupidly.

‘No it’s not,’ It opens it mouth a little too wide, bloody drool slipping out the side of its mouth. ‘I would have come to you anyway, eventually.’

‘Not soon enough.’

‘No.’ It says agreeably. ‘Never quite soon enough.’

‘So I’ll ask you a riddle.’

Lips crash onto hers and again everything is very bright before it is very dark.

\--

Something old and human shaped is holding her to its lap. They sit between two hills and watch children play with wooden weapons. A dark haired boy picks up a sword and dances around another boy, this one fair as fair can be. The dark haired boy swings and swings and swings, always missing. He’s happy thought, it’s just a game. Suddenly the fair haired boy has a wood knife in his hand batting against the edge of the sword. The dark haired boy startles, tips his wrist down, and the wood knife skitters up the blade of the sword, dashes splinters into his hand. The dark haired boy spits and snarls words, the sword shedding wooden skin and becoming a steel blade. He takes the other boys head off, blonde hair fanning the ground. The boy cries.  

From over the other hill a girl descends with a furious cry, a bow in one hand, a knife in the other. She stops in front of the dark haired boy. The boy cries and holds his hand flat. She brands him with her knife, spits in the wound. Lydia knows that it’s a curse, a mean one. The old thing holding her there sighs in relief as if to say _see, was that so hard?_ It offers her a butterfly, sprinkled purple and red, Lydia takes it but she can’t swallow it. The old thing nods.

The scene changes. There are more children wearing torn up clothing; one side in dark blue and the other in shining silver. The two boys from before stand at the front and in short turn pick up their no longer wooden swords and kill each other. The children form a line and the patterns continue on and on for what feels like centuries. A girl stands at the front and this time she parries instead of attacks. Turns the swords over and over until they lie on the ground, forgotten and useless. Turned from steel to wood. There are no more children after that; she’s not sure what that means.  

\--

She wakes again in an old and battered bed; the sheets are rumpled around her feet. There’s something slimy crawling across her stomach, wriggling against skin. Above her the moon hangs too close to the earth. The woods stretch infinitely out around her. In front of her there is a dark mirror.

She gets out of the bed slowly. Her clothes are odd and it feels like she’s carrying six times the weight of her body on her back. It takes an age to walk to the mirror. She’s dressed in a familiar pale dress. In her reflection her arms are stiff in her too small clothes. Her stockings are ripped apart at her thigh by muscles, her belly is no longer as fast as it was in high school, the shoes on her feet fit but her makeup is now ten years too young for her.  

_Who are you without them?_

The reflection in the mirror falls to the ground and is dragged away by unseen hands. The dark comes rushing up to her, over her, leaving blue edged fingertips struggling at the edge. The dark recedes and there is Lydia at 18 in dirty scrubs, blood pouring from underneath her fingernails. The dark swallows that image too and returns Lydia now standing in her ruined dress filled with worms.

With shaking hands Lydia reaches up to undo the dress. Worms fall over her wrists and fingers as she lowers the zipper. It gets stuck halfway. The moon grows bigger and brighter and more menacing in the sky. The zipper pops off the dress, the space between her and the dress filling up with more slime. Her hands shake. She can’t breathe.

The reflection in the mirror shifts into Peter. She’s not scared of him anymore. Peter is old and sad and as mortal as herself.

The reflection shifts to Scott who she _does_ fear. Not because of trauma or fury. Scott who can rewrite the entire world with the force of his convictions. Scott who was mad at her for leaving not because of cowardice but because he was scared for her. Scott who would fight all her battles even if it would kill them both. Scott who smiled at her. She fears what he could make her be. That fear is tempered with understanding. Scott is something she chose not something thrust upon her.

The reflection shifts restlessly. Slowly it pulls light from the moon, the mirror losses its edges and falls in on itself twisting into the shape of...Jackson.

She looks at Jackson. Hugo Boss suit, smirk, bottle of alcohol in one hand. His eyes are the same striking shade, his hair is hyper bright with the moon. He’s a wolf here like he always wanted. He smirks at her. He is beautiful. He is dead. 

Lydia lifts her arms against the too small fabric of her dress, grips it at the top where the worms are pressed against her heart. Then she begins to tear it off. The worms fall into caterpillars which fall to butterflies which fall to dust. She rips her stockings, she rips the pins out of her hair, she rubs the makeup off her face. The red of her lipstick smears across her hands. Blood spills from Jackson in the same shade as her lipstick.

Jackson’s face holds in the mirror at every age she knew him. As a child after she first moved to Beacon Hills, as a teenager when she first discovered boys, as a freshman when she started her hostile takeover, as a scared and broken girl on a field, as the love of her life reflected in headlights, as his smiling face on the last morning she saw him alive. The images coalesce and to her surprise Jackson, who never had any use for a genuine smile where a smirk would do, is bright eyed and smiling at her. 

The last scrap of fabric changes into dust. The moonlight fades to black.

\--

She wakes up alone.

It feels like someone’s sewn her shut, hot prickling across her stomach. She lifts her dress enough to see.

Splayed across her stomach are a pair of open hands made of tiny individual butterflies. The universe she had drawn on has rearranged itself to accommodate, stars stretching up from her hipbones to curl up under her bra. The parts of the tattoo lower down have disappeared. At least this will be much easier to hide. The hands frame a symbol she can’t really look at and if she squints she thinks the ink shifts. Picking up a nearby stick she pokes her stomach experimentally. The hands shiver and the left one makes a shooing gesture, her skin rippling with it. Great, now she needs to throw up.

‘Sure Lydia,’ she says to herself and the dumb thing she just did, ‘ _swallow a god_. Brilliant.’

She gets up and walks for what feels like days. Slipping comfortably out of reality and letting her body lead her. Every so often the hands on her stomach will tug on her skin, pull her in a different direction. More than once the hands make her stand still, find water; eat twigs and animals and a million other things she doesn’t really hang on to. Sometimes she can hear the sound of hooves, all of the woods straining to reach her, find her, bring her back home. She’s an airborne thing now for all that her feet are on the ground. Eventually the fugue state ends and she awakens by a road. A car eventually rumbles to a stop and the hands that gather her up are familiar.

‘You’ve been gone for nearly two weeks. It took _three days_ to find Peter.’ Derek says panicked. She can see cars pull up behind him. Hear voices filled with worry. ‘What’s in your hair?’

Lydia palms her head, thick masses of thread coming out, which, _gross_ , but then she thinks and everything comes together. There’s tremendous warmth in her body, soaking into her bones, light gushing from her skin, she feels like she did the first time she made somewhere safe. She feels _safe_. ‘Silk.’

She laughs until she cries and then she laughs again.

\--

She ends up in Allison’s car while she shares a long tense conversation with Derek. Allison has her hands behind her back, thumb curled under the bracelet Cerise made her for her birthday. One of them will have to break soon. Derek has to know; especially once blood starts hitting the ground.

In the backseat of the car is a box of half aborted knitting. Lydia tugs at the strings of a golden scarf, stops, considers mythology, and then does not touch _anything._   

Allison’s foot taps against the ground the way it does when she’s furious and uncomfortable.  Derek carefully avoids meeting her eyes. A few sad seconds later Allison strides back to the car.

‘Hey.’ Lydia says.

‘Hey,’ Allison smiles, ‘so you lied to me. About everything.’

Lydia raises an eyebrow. ‘So did you, a long time ago. I think I might start trying to forgive you for that.’

Allison laughs. ‘Oh god, please? You are terrifying angry and you’ve been angry for so long.’

Lydia huffs and shakes her head. Allison has more laugh lines now then she did the last time she saw her. Underneath the smell of herbs and wolfsbane in the car is the softer smell of hypoallergenic sunshine and bergamot detergent that Allison only ever uses when she has Cerise with her. ‘Tell him today.’

‘No,’ Allison bites her lip ‘it’s not the right time.’

‘It never will be,’ Lydia nods towards where Derek is unsubtly staring at them. The look on his face is terrifyingly vast and sad.

Allison has always been fearless. She turns away and marches right back over to him and begins to talk. Derek’s face shuts down as he listens. Lydia can see the moment when Allison loses her courage. She drops her eyes from the edge of Derek’s smile and tugs on the ends of her shirt. To her surprise, Allison tugs off the bracelet Cerise made and slips it onto Derek’s wrist. As she walks away she motions for Lydia to get out of the car, kisses her hard on the cheek, gets in and all but runs away.

‘She gave me this bracelet.’ The bracelet is stretched to its limit on his thick wrists, the red, orange, and blue beads standing out against his skin. It suits him.

‘Yeah,’ Lydia smiles, ‘do you know what cherry is in French?’

‘Cerise. Why?’

‘Needed it for a crossword. Six letter word for hope.’

Derek looks at her like she’s crazy. Lydia is almost certain she’s not.

\--

The only time Jackson manages to spit out the words ‘ _I love you_ ’ they’re sitting in his car looking at the night sky through the tinted glass. Lydia is thinking about a gas giant burning it’s self up and the new born star smashing into existence beyond. She is thinking of cycles.

‘I love you,’ he says, like he’s cut his own tongue out.

‘I know,’ and she’s still looking at the stars, still thinking of cycles, ‘I love you too.’

Jackson smiles and looks to the sky as well. His hand finds hers.

\--

It is strange, Lydia thinks sitting across from her new therapist, just how much she has forgotten. It’s never always one way or the other. Never just good or just bad. It always slips and slides from one end to the other. It’s been a decade of resenting Jackson, forging him into this mythological figure she could not conquer. Jackson was a scared sixteen year old boy who didn’t know if anyone loved him. He wore stupid collars and never took out the trash. The worst thing he could imagine was saying ‘I love you’. He’s a ghost. She’s been all but worshipping a ghost.

‘I redefined my entire life by the pain he caused me.’ Lydia says with utter disbelief. ‘How could I do that?’

‘You should try holding on to hope,’ Dr Hoang says, ‘instead of loss.’

Lydia looks at her hands, feels the ones imbedded in her stomach. ‘I don’t know how.’

‘Luckily for you no one does,’ Dr Hoang smiles, ‘but there are always ways to learn.’

\--

It won’t leave.

‘It says,’ Stiles sighs and rubs his tired red rimmed eyes. They’ve been at this for _hours,_ ‘and you should know I don’t have the first clue what language it’s speaking, that this is the first suitable host it’s had since before humans even had a concept of time and it’s not going to leave just so you can play with it. It also thinks that it was very rude of you to spend so many centuries calling just to breathe creepily down the line and hang up again.’ Stiles pauses for gravitas. ‘Or something.’

‘But we need it.’

‘The most equivalent gesture I have is a toddler blowing a raspberry.’ He looks around the people gathered. ‘It’s very young.’

‘It’s older than the concept of time.’ Lydia says flatly. Louisa is at her back, Derek to the left, keeping the gawkers gathered at the Hale House at bay. Today is the Wolf Moon and everyone has come to celebrate. ‘It can at least mange the social decency of a 12 year old.’

‘It probably won’t even be out of puberty by the time all of humanity rejoins the primordial soup,’ Stiles shakes his head. ‘Jesus Lydia when you play you _play_.’

Everyone laughs and dissolve around the food table.

  
Lydia drops her hand over Stiles’. ‘I was there too. I should have seen the person you’d grow into then, I didn’t. I’d apologise but we both know how useless that would be.’  
  
Stiles blinks, a genuine smile bleeding onto his face. ‘Unlike the others I never counted you out. I owe you an apology.’

Lydia shakes her head. ‘No, you owe me an explanation.’

‘We’ve been prepping this ritual for the better part of a year. We couldn’t stabilize the altar or do a hundred basic things like set up a safe house to store it in once we’d gotten it to manifest or manipulate minor ley lines, re-ward the town so it doesn’t disintegrate in the middle of chanting; shit you can only manage when your magic isn’t as broken as mine is. I couldn’t call in an outside contractor because I would have to trust them with secrets, _Scott’s_ , mine, Allison’s. My name hasn’t really done me any favours in that regard.’ Stiles smile threatens to turn into a sneer. ‘And then you brought me Louisa, who is stronger than me with a reputation that forces respect and best of all; a million secrets that were so easy to use against her. Anywhere else in the world and she’d have squashed me like a bug but the magic is different here. She didn’t stand a chance. You brought me that cult too. I offered to help them when they came looking for their lost sacrifice. School children taught only one piece of magic, easy prey,’ his face falls. ‘They were so young.’

‘You should give me a reason not to hate you.’

‘No I shouldn’t.’ Stiles snaps. ‘I used her like Peter used you and Scott and- I’m as bad as him. I’m as bad as he always thought I could be. Does everyone think I didn’t know? That I couldn’t see the way he treated me? I-’ He swears. ‘I wanted to not be the man he thought I was.’

‘I’m not saving you, I don’t even want to help you, but I can’t be me and let that man haunt someone else.’ Lydia inhales sharply, the hands on her stomach pressing in what she hopes is comfort and not sudden indigestion. ‘Look at your history Stilinski, did your mother love you?’

‘Of course.’

There is no _of course_ about that statement but that he thinks there is might be the only good thing his parents did for him. ‘Your mother was ten times the monster you think you are. She was a thief, a murderer, a torturer, and the worst kind of temptress. Then she went to a small town in bug fuck nowhere, got arrested for a broken headlight, and met the one man in all the world who was strong enough to stand against her. They fell in love, she defied near to four centuries worth of behavioural patterns and religious dogma to give birth to you and give you the kindness she was denied. She sacrificed everything to give you nineteen years without the Damocles of your name hanging above your head.

‘You helped Scott when he needed you most. You kept helping him even when a few innocent childhood mistakes lead to the greatest metanatual fuck up in three centuries. You stayed in this shit hole of bad memories and blood when you could have left. I did and you could have too and you know that. I fucking hate you right now, but we live in the time of monsters and no one is anyone’s hero. You’re not a good person I’m not going to demean any of us by even suggesting it, but in a house full of monsters you are not remarkable or special or particularly interesting.’

Stiles shakes his head. ‘With great power comes an overwhelming ego and the idea that you are infallible. I’ve hurt a lot of people proving I’m not.’

‘I know you. I understand you. If you ever pull anything close to this again I will drag you out back and put the fear of every kind of god into you.’

‘If anything went the way _this_ went again I think I’d want you to.’

‘So we’re agreed.’

Stiles nods. ‘Thank you.’

She walks away from him straight out of the Hale House and on to the back patio. The Mechanic is sitting by the window. She basically twists herself in a ball to avoid making eye contact. She leaps off the last step and toes off her shoes and sticks her feet in the earth. Some days it feels like the thing in her skin is trying to lift her off the ground, float her away. Scott comes up slowly, drink in hand. She takes it off him.  
  
He sticks his chin up. ‘I won’t apologise for trying to keep you safe.’  
  
‘Should I expect this kind of asinine bullheadedness every time I do something _you_ deem irresponsible?’ She takes a pointed sip of her drink. ‘You’re ex-girlfriend is a spymaster-cum-revolutionary who is single handily fighting an oppressive regime her own family has kept in power for centuries and your mother pioneered a service to cater specifically to omegas bitten in extreme circumstances. Where on earth did this macho pseudo feminist chivalry bullshit come from?’  
  
‘Allison I understand completely. We were dragged into this; we aren’t getting out again until we die. You could leave anytime you wanted, be normal.’ And just to prove that Scott has missed several key parts of this lesson. ‘You get to choose.’  
  
‘I swallowed a god last week.’  
  
‘Thank you for that.’  
  
She doesn’t know if he means _thank you for saving me from the choice_ or _thank you for being strong when I wasn’t sure you could be_ or _thank you for being around._ ‘I did it for me. You had nothing to do with it.’  
  
‘Not even a little?’  
  
‘Not even a little.’  
  
Scott shakes his head and walks away. Even if she spent the next three decades trying she doesn’t think she could make him understand. Scott ultimately decided to embrace being a werewolf, chose to lead this war. For him it’s an act of love. He loves the people he’s trying to save so the action is ultimately granted grace. He chose to love and thus chose war. Choice in the absence of it, when you’re stripped down to the core and the only thing you have is _who you are,_ is a kind of sacrifice. It’s not about good or evil, hate or love, it’s about whether or not you cease to exist. Her and Jackson; they _unravelled_. Everything they were flew apart and then disintegrated into stardust. Everything they could have been crumbled under the heel of the men that used them.  
  
Until she stole the last breathe of a god, until she turned Peter into what he forced her to be, until she stood on a roof at two am and looked at a faraway star and realised that it was much hotter and much closer than she’d first thought, until she’d been back and away and back again; she didn’t realise how strong and important every choice _was_. Whether it be about what colour to paint the walls or what to eat or who to save and who to love. Just surviving in the wake of what happened, holding on to what little of herself she’d had left, makes her astounding. Choosing to wake up as Lydia Martin when she could have let it go, could have vanished under the weight of her demons, that’s a feat she wouldn’t have expected. It’s not what destroyed her that matters, it’s what she can build from it, it’s what she chooses to grow from it. And that one is a choice _she_ gets to make.     

\--

Finale - Lydia Martin, Reprise (‘Cause This Is About Life and Life Isn’t About Death)

\--

  
It’s snowing the day she finally goes to check out the book left in her name.  
  
The librarian hands over the book with a disinterested sniff and a catty remark about old relics. The cover is blue, shiny as the door of her home. It hums under her fingers. She sits at the table where she and Derek play chess. She traces the knotted work Derek has been grinding in with his claws every time they play chess. The pattern is deep and detailed and it’s a flush of pride to know that she fucks with him this much. The book is loud as she drops it on the table, spine cracking, and when she thumbs it open a gorgeous green embossed envelope falls out. She doesn’t recognise the calligraphy on the front but she does recognise her name. She opens it, the sound triple loud in the quiet room.  
  
 _For Lydia,_ the note says in Jackson’s hand and it is not beautiful and it is not profound but it begins to answer a question. There are a billion stars and a billion universe and a billion choices and a billion more equations and numbers and recipes. There are choices and fate and wolves in the forest and girls who covered themselves in poison and girls who take destiny and shoot it from their own bow. There are boys who were once happy and are happy again now. There are safe places you build for yourself in other people; nightmares you tear down. There is a little girl out in the world who has no destiny written on her birth certificate. There is a town in the woods full of monsters.  
  
There is Lydia; healing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i sort of want to mention the idea that spawned this whole thing 
> 
> directly after the weird mish mash of events that was the season two finale i had this idea for a scenario where lydia got out her frustrations through baking, which is admittedly something i do, and it was going to be a funny little one short/feel good fic. then a few days later fics started cropping up where jackson did stay dead; full disclosure most of the expression of lydia's ptsd in this fic is extrapolated from my own trauma that resulted out of a very similar event (i say very because a) no murdering lizard and b) i can actually confirm the dates of events in my life which as an ability that seems to be deleted in-universe for teen wolf) and because of that trauma, i think, i found a lot of it dissatisfying. i couldn't really wrap my head around the way they talked about lydia, how she got over it so fast, how she could find her footing so quickly after all of it, how she didn't end up in the weird self loathing black hole i did. that's not the fault of those writers or my experience, but i did feel i had to write something that made sense to me. i ended up working through some of my own stuff while writing this and in the process of trying to figure out how this universe made some pretty big discoveries myself. i definitely would not have finished this last section without your kind comments, so thank you for reading and enjoying this near year long venture. 
> 
> this huge stupid universe happened because i don't know how to write small so there's likely to be more of this. if you want to [say hi](http://vievivavoce.tumblr.com/) feel free, i'll probably also put extra content over there too.
> 
> stay cool marshmallows


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